Carmen Suite (ballet)

Carmen Suite is a one-act ballet created in 1967 by Cuban choreographer Alberto Alonso to music by Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin for his wife, prima ballerina assoluta Maya Plisetskaya. The premiere took place on 20 April 1967 at the Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow. The music, taken from the opera Carmen by Georges Bizet and arranged for strings and percussion, is not a 19th-century pastiche but rather "a creative meeting of the minds," as Shchedrin put it, with Bizet's melodies reclothed in a variety of fresh instrumental colors (including the frequent use of percussion), set to new rhythms and often phrased with a great deal of sly wit. Initially banned by the Soviet hierarchy as "disrespectful" to the opera for precisely these qualities, the ballet has since become Shchedrin's best-known work and has remained popular in the West for what reviewer James Sanderson calls "an iconoclastic but highly entertaining retelling of Bizet's opera."

The ballet is in one act containing 13 dance numbers:

A standard string orchestra of violins, violas, cellos, double basses is augmented by a percussion battery of four members, who play the following:

Player 1: marimba, vibraphone, castanets, three cowbells, four bongos, bells, snare drum, guiro

Player 2: vibraphone, marimba, snare drum, tambourine, two woodblocks, claves, triangle, guiro

Player 3: hand bells, crotales, maracas, whip, snare drum, choclo, guiro, three temple blocks, bass drum, tam-tam, snare drum, triangle

Player 4: cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, hi-hat, triangle, tambourine, tom-tom, timpani

Two factors influenced Shchedrin in choosing this instrumentation. The first, he said in an interview with BBC Music Magazine, was that, "to be [as] totally far [as possible]" from Bizet's scoring for the opera, he wanted an ensemble "without brass and woodwind ... that gave me many possibilities" for timbral variety. The second was the high level of string and percussion players then available in the Bolshoi orchestra.

The idea for Carmen Suite originated with Shchedrin's wife, Bolshoi Theatre ballerina Maya Plisetskaya. In 1964, she asked composer Dmitri Shostakovich to compose a ballet on the story of Carmen, since, Shchedrin said, they were both on good terms with him. Shostakovich "gently but firmly refused," Plisetskaya remembers. "I'm afraid of Bizet," he told her half-jokingly. "Everyone is so used to the opera that whatever you write, you'll disappoint them." He suggested that perhaps Shchedrin could "come up with something special" to fulfill her request. Instead, she went to Aram Khachaturian, the composer of the ballets Gayane and Spartacus, but "things never went beyond talking." Shchedrin added that Khachaturian told Plisetskaya, "Why you need me? You have a composer at home, ask him!" It was then, he said, that she asked him to write the music.

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