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Carmen, L' Arlesienne Suites: Bizet's "Greatest Hits" are showcased in this CBS "Great Performances" albumDec 11 '04 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line Excerpts of two of this French composer's greatest musical works are showcased in this CBS Records "Great Performances" album. Highly recommended!
As a young college freshman in Prof. Jay Brown's Humanities 101 class, I learned a little bit about different subjects covered in that mandatory course for first-year students at what is now called Miami-Dade College. Although Brown's curriculum was heavy on philosophy and we had to read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, we also learned a great deal about classical music because our professor was, and still is, a professional musician who's one of the very few performers who can play the glass harmonica (or simply the "glasses") an instrument invented by Benjamin Franklin. Naturally, we had many lectures about various styles and eras of music, including opera. It was in Prof. Brown's HUM 101 and a subsequent Music Appreciation class that I learned about Georges Bizet, also known by some musical historians as the "French Mozart," for like Austria's most renowned composer, he was born into a family of accomplished musicians in 1838. Like Wolfgang Amadeus, he also began his musical education early (entering the Paris Conservatory at the age of nine); by his 17th birthday Georges had composed his Symphony in C, which wouldn't be found and performed until nearly 100 years after his birth. Finally, just as Mozart didn't live to see his 40th year, Bizet died at the age of 36, due to his frail health and the stresses of his successful musical career. A few years before his death, however, Bizet composed two of the most famous contributions to classical music by a son of La belle France. The best known, of course, is the world's most popular opera, Carmen, which is set in Sevilla (Seville), Spain and tells the story of the doomed love between the fiery gypsy Carmen and army corporal Don Jose. Though Bizet did not bother traveling to Spain to get a "feel" for the country's musical idioms, Carmen's score, which includes such famous songs and arias as Les Toreadors (Track 1), Habanera (Track 8), and the fiery, passionate Danse Boheme (Track 10)), has a very Iberian flavor that sounds as if the composer had lived in sunny and sultry Andalusia. In this early 1980s CBS Records offering in the Great Performances label, conductor Leopold Stokowski leads the National Philharmonic Orchestra in a vivacious and vibrant performance of the complete Carmen Suite: No.1 (Les Toreadors, Prelude, Aragonaise, Intermezzo, Seguidilla, Les Dragons d' Alcala) and excerpts from Carmen Suite: 2 (Marche des Contrabandiers, Habanera, La Garde Montante, Danse Boheme) At times triumphant, at other times tragic, Carmen's score is timeless and always accessible. Stokowski also leads the NPO in an equally bravura performance of Bizet's incidental music for Alphonse Daudet's tragic play L' Arlesienne, a story of passion, unrequited love, and suicide. The L' Arlessiene: Suite No. 1 (Prelude, Menuetto No. 1, Adagietto, Carillon) is played in its entirety, as are excerpts from the Suite No.2 (Pastorale, Menuetto No. 2, Farandole). Because the story of Daudet's play echoes Carmen's melodramatic themes of passion and death, the music also shifts from bright and cheery to tragic and bittersweet, albeit with a more French flavor. This 55-minute long recording is just a glimpse into one of the world's true musical geniuses; while it is classical music, it's never tedious or soporific. Indeed, it's an ideal CD to introduce a young or reluctant listener to the joys of symphonic music, since some of its tracks have been made popular in such crowd-pleasing films as 1976's Bad News Bears. This is an entry for sleeper54's Lean-n-Mean III Write Off.  |
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