Last week, the widely praised conductor Sir Neville Marriner passed away at the age of 92. We are fortunate that he has left us so much beautiful music, so we are able to commemorate him properly. One of these beautiful pieces of music is featured on our release of Georges Bizet: Carmen & L’Arlesienne, on which he conducted the London Symphony Orchestra. Audiophile Audition has now issued a wonderful release on this album. According to the review, ”Pentatone restores Sir Neville Marriner’s intensely effective 1978 Bizet suites.”
”The opening, lugubrious Pastorale seems “authentic” enough, in its Provencal guise. The last movement, Farandole, gives us a splashy, contrapuntal combination taken from the original incidental music superimposed to a raucous coda.”
”Composer Georges Bizet (1838-1875), tragically and ironically, died suddenly in June 1875, only three months after the unsuccessful première of his opera Carmen at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, 3 March 1875. The opera’s première in Vienna in October that same year scored a global triumph, a Pyrrhic victory for a composer who thought this most revered opera a dismal failure.”
Read the full article on the website of Audiophile Audition.
