MARBECKS COLLECTABLE: Bizet - Carmen & L'Arlesienne suites

This is a re-issue of an outstanding "demonstration" disc featuring colourful French orchestral music.

The partnership of Charles Dutoit and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra has, during the 1980s and 1990s, produced some of the finest recordings ever made of music from the French repertoire. The early 1980s launched this partnership with acclaimed digital recordings of Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé and Boléro and this was followed up with countless recordings of similar quality and flair, including this popular Bizet coupling.

Although the premiere of Carmen was a disaster, the opera later gained favour and now ranks amongst opera's Top Ten. The colourful orchestral suites, which use those marvellous melodies from the opera, are equally popular (especially with those who are not enthusiastic about the sound of the human voice in singing mode). The L'Arlésienne suites are also richly colourful; Daudet's play L'Arlésienne, for which Bizet wrote the incidental music, is far from being light entertainment, but it is set in the beautiful Provence countryside, and it is on this aspect which Bizet concentrated when he created his score.

"This is a splendid account of these four suites. They call for performances having qualities of subtlety and delicacy as well as earthly vitality, and they receive them here in full measure. The playing under Dutoit is so satisfying that it hardly seems necessary to point to much detail ... The recording is exceptionally vivid and spatially rich yet natural-sounding ... the CD at 73 minutes is generous in quantity (as well as quality) of music ... this impressive Dutoit issue"
Gramophone