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“CARMEN – SUITE”

Georges Bizet – Rodion Shchedrin

Choreography by Alberto Alonso
Choreography’s Redaction by Tarand Gediminas

The man we know as Georges Bizet was actually born Alexandre Césare Léopold Bizet in 1838 in Paris. A child prodigy, he became a student at the Paris Conservatoire when he was just ten, as a pupil of Zimmerman and then Jacques Halevy (whose daughter Genevieve, he later married in 1869). He was also an adoring disciple of Charles Gounod.

As a youth he took every prize in sight - piano, organ, composition - and in 1857, before he was twenty, he won the Grand Prix de Rome. Bizet's Symphony No. 1 in C was written at only age 17. However this exceptional work was not performed until 80 years later.
The Franco-Prussian War found Bizet in the National Guard as a soldier (as was Saint-Saëns), and it was during this time that he composed his piano duet Jeux d'Enfants.

Although best known today as the composer of Carmen, success for that opera did not come until after Bizet's death. He was in fact better known in his day for his non-operatic compositions such as Jeux d'enfants, Petite Suite and incidental music to L'Arlésienne (from 1872, the year he began contemplating Carmen). He was also an accomplished pianist who astonished even Franz Liszt, but he rarely appeared in public and composed only a few pieces for the piano.

With Carmen, Bizet not only sought success but wanted to reform opéra-comique to a more contemporary, less idealistic feel. He worked within the framework of opéra-comique but added new vitality, with stronger, more realistic emotions and passionate feelings.
Although Carmen is Spanish in sound, it does so not by using Spanish rhythms or themes. The score is alive with small points of imitative writing - often no more than a few bars - which stir memories and hint at associations in the mind of the listener. Each scene has a flavor of its own, (soldiers, ragamuffins, smugglers, or the crowd at the bullring), a Spanish "chiaroscuro" against which the principals stand out.
Carmen is a hymn of love; love pure, honest, burning, demanding, love with a colossal upsurge of feelings that none of the men whom she met was worthy of. For her love is the essence of life. No one could understand and value her internal world, hidden, behind dazzling beauty. Carmen passionately loved Jose. Her love transformed the coarse, limited, soldier, enlarged him, opened the way to spiritual happiness, but for Carmen his embraces soon turn into chains. Drunk with emotion, Jose does not try to understand Carmen.

He begins to love not her, but his passion for her... She might love Torero who is not indifferent to her beauty. But Torero, outwardly gallant, sparkling, fearless, is internally inert, cold and incapable of fighting for love. A man like him cannot love the proud and demanding Carmen.

Bizet died of cardiac complications at Bougival in 1875, aged 36. Many believe his health condition was exacerbated by the failure of Carmen, which was receiving its 31st performance that night.

Performers:

Carmen – Anastasia Miheikina (Ana Pashkova)
Don Jose ­– Nariman Bekzhanov
Toreador -  Volkov
Korehidor – Yuri Ostrovsky
Fate – Elena Kolesnichenko
Ciganke – Ekaterina Tikanova, Y. Golovyna

Performed by Imperial Russian Ballet

 

“BOLERO”
                                     
Maurice Ravel

Choreography by Nikolaj Androsov
Costume Designer - Ala Koženkova

Maurice Ravel's father's background was Swiss and his mother's Basque, but he was brought up in Paris, where he studied at the Conservatoire, 1889-95, returning in 1897 for further study with Fauré and Gédalge. In 1893 he met Chabrier and Satie, both of whom were influential. A decade later he was an established composer, at least of songs and piano pieces, working with luminous precision in a style that could imitate Lisztian bravura (Jeux d'eau) or Renaissance calm (Pavane pour une infante défunte); there was also the String Quartet, somewhat in the modal style of Debussy's but more ornately instrumented. However, he five times failed to win the Prix de Rome (1900-05) and left the Conservatoire to continue his life as a freelance musician.

During the next decade, that of his 30s, he was at his most productive. There was a rivalry with Debussy and some dispute about priority in musical discoveries, but Ravel's taste for sharply defined ideas and closed formal units was entirely his own, as was the grand virtuosity of much of his piano music from this period, notably the cycles Miroirs and Gaspard de la nuit. Many works also show his fascination with things temporally or geographically distant, with moods sufficiently alien to be objectively drawn: these might be historical musical styles, as in the post-Schubertian Valses nobles et sentimentales, or the imagination of childhood, as in Ma mère l'oye. Or the composer's inspection might be turned on the East (Shéhérazade) or, as happened repeatedly, on Spain (Rapsodie espagnole, the comic opera L'heure espagnole). Or there might be a double focus, as in the vision of ancient Greece through the modification of 18th century French classicism in the languorous ballet Daphnis et Chloé, written for Dyagilev.

The Ballets Russes were also important in introducing him to Stravinsky, with whom he collaborated on a version of Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina, and whose musical development he somewhat paralleled during the decade or so after The Rite of Spring. The set of three Mallarmé songs with nonet accompaniment were written partly under the influence of Stravinsky's Japanese Lyrics and Schönberg's Pierrot lunaire and the two sonatas of the 1920s can be compared with Stravinsky's abstract works of the period in their harmonic astringency and selfconscious use of established forms. However, Ravel's Le tombeau de Couperin, just as selfconscious, predates Stravinsky's neo-classicism, and the pressure of musical history is perhaps felt most intensely in the ballet La valse, where 3/4 rhythm develops into a dance macabre: both these works, like many others, exist in both orchestral and piano versions, testifying to Ravel's superb technique in both media (in 1922 he applied his orchestral skills tellingly to Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition).

Other postwar works return to some of the composer's obsessions: with the delights and dangers of the child's world in the sophisticated fantasy opera L'enfant et les sortilèges, with musical Spanishness in Bolero and the songs for a projected Don Quixote film, and with the exotic in the Chansons madécasses. His last major effort was a pair of piano concertos, one exuberant and cosmopolitan (in G Major), the other (for left hand only) more darkly and sturdily single-minded. He died after a long illness.
 

Performers:

Goddess – Elena Kolesnichenko
Main Pagan – Gediminas Taranda (Nariman Bekzhanov)
Pagans – Ekaterina Tikanova, Y. Golovyna

 

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