21 MOZART VIOLIN CONCERTO NO. 3

RODION SHCHEDRIN (b. 1932)

Carmen Suite (after Bizet) (1967)

Scored for: timpani, percussion, and strings Performance time: 44 minutes

First Grant Park Orchestra performance

If you’re expecting a bland, straightforward medley of themes from Bizet’s 1875 opera Carmen, prepare to be delightfully surprised. Cuban choreographer Alberto Alonso approached Bolshoi prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya about creating a one-act ballet based on the Carmen story. After approaching numerous composers, including Dmitri Shostakovich, with no success, they realized the solution was right under their noses: Plisetskaya’s own husband, composer Rodion Shchedrin.

Shchedrin found it impossible to extricate Bizet’s music from the story of Carmen. He did not want to create what he termed a “slavish obeisance to the genius of Bizet,” but rather “a creative meeting of the two minds.” Numerous arrangements of Bizet’s score had been written over the years, but Shchedrin’s suite would be the most ambitious and original yet. One way he achieved this was by scoring his ballet for string orchestra and fortyseven percussion instruments. This unique orchestration casts Bizet’s familiar melodies in new colors, and the virtuosic percussion emphasizes the rhythmic precision of Bizet’s Spanish-inflected score.

Because Bizet’s opera is so well known, the smallest rhythmic, harmonic, or textural changes to the melodies stand out. Shchedrin often presents these melodies in fragments, leaving the audience to fill in the blanks. For instance, the famous Toreador song, which appears in the ninth number Torero, suddenly disappears, leaving only the accompaniment underneath. Shchedrin recalled the first cellist asking during a preliminary rehearsal, “But who is singing the melody?” The conductor replied, “Everyone sings inside. Everyone is a Toreador for himself.” In addition to the enduring melodies of Carmen, Shchedrin incorporates music from some of Bizet’s other stage works, including the famous Farandole from L’Arlésienne and a theme from La jolie fille de Perth.

The ballet loosely follows the plot of the opera: soldier Don José has been told to marry a girl from his village named Micäela. However, he quickly becomes so enamored of Carmen, the seductive cigarette girl, that he abandons his military duties to run away with her and her Romani companions. The elusive Carmen eventually becomes bored with José and tells him to go home. She runs off with the dashing toreador Escamillo: Don José stabs her in a jealous rage.

Both Bizet’s opera and Shchedrin’s ballet faced critical backlash after their premieres. Bizet’s Carmen famously scandalized critics and audience members with its obscenity and the immorality of its central characters. Soviet authorities were similarly outraged by Shchedrin’s interpretation when it premiered at the Bolshoi Theater in 1967, claiming he had made a mockery of Bizet’s masterpiece and that the ballet overly sexualized Carmen (which leads one to wonder what sort of productions they had seen of the opera). As a result, the press acted as if the premiere had never happened, and the ballet was replaced by The Nutcracker in its second night. Shostakovich came to Shchedrin’s rescue and eventually convinced the authorities to let it run. The Carmen Suite has since become Shchedrin’s best-known work, and as you will hear, holds its own off the ballet stage.