Revisiting the “Carmen Suite” Ballet

This is the week when the San Francisco Symphony, led by guest conductor Joseph Young, will perform the music for the “Carmen Suite” ballet, first performed on April 20, 1967 at the Bolshoi Theatre with prima ballerina assoluta Maya Plisetskaya in the title role. The choreography was created by Alberto Alonso, who was, at the time, the choreographer for the Ballet Nacional de Cuba. Plisetskaya’s husband, Rodion Shchedrin provided a score, which he called “a creative meeting of the minds,” the minds being his own and that of Georges Bizet, composer of the Carmen opera.

“Creative” is definitely the operative word in that phrase. To fit Alonso’s distillation of Bizet’s opera, Shchedrin cherry-picked his way through Bizet’s score, rearranging the music for a string orchestra augmented by one timpanist and four percussionists, each in charge of a generous battery of pitched and unpitched instruments. The choreography was similarly provocative, playing up the sexual interplay among the key characters in Bizet’s opera with a hyper-charged rhetoric that, even in the Sixties, was seldom encountered on an opera stage. As a result, between the bizarre sonorities coming out of the orchestra pit and the unabashed sexuality taking place on stage, Yekaterina Furtseva, Soviet Minister of Culture, banned the work immediately after its premiere performance.

Here in the United States awareness of this production was limited to an Angel album of Shchedrin’s score. It was one of those records that got played for friends with the preface, “You ain’t gonna believe this!” Shchedrin had a prankish sense of humor that amounted to never missing an opportunity to thumb his nose at authority. (The first of his five concertos for orchestra was given the title “Naughty Limericks.”) The prospect of seeing the choreography associated with his outlandish treatment of Bizet seemed out of the question on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Fortunately, time seems to heal wounds inflicted by Soviet authority. As early as 1974, Plisetskaya was allowed to arrange a world tour with selected “Stars of the Bolshoi Ballet” as the program notes put it; and, on September 17 of that year, they gave the United States its first exposure to Alonso’s “Carmen Suite” ballet. Almost two years later, on June 12, 1976, American Ballet Theatre (ABT) added the ballet to its repertoire. Both of those performances of the ballet were given at the Metropolitan Opera House in Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. I cannot, for the life of me, remember which of these I saw; but I am pretty sure it was the ABT performance.

These days “Carmen Suite” has a respectable presence on YouTube. There is a video of Alicia Alonso (Alberto’s sister-in-law) performing the leading role with the Cuban National Ballet at a performance on August 4, 1967 (back when the ballet was declared off-limits to the United States by the Soviet authorities). This is a black-and-white film, whose audio track is only marginally better than the video. More satisfying is the video of the Cuban performance on June 21, 2015, which actually documents two performances with different casts back-to-back. However, for my own money, the most satisfying video is a Bolshoi performance from 2019 (YouTube does not provide a more specific date) with Svetlana Zakharova in the title role.

Svetlana Zakharova doing what she does best (screen shot from the video being discussed)

Zakharova has extensions that are nothing short of jaw-dropping. At the risk of stepping on the wrong toes, I would suggest that her youth endows her with an agility that was simply beyond the scope of the much more mature Plisetskaya and Alonzo, who led the “original casts” in Russia and Cuba, respectively. Furthermore, there is a dramatic acuity in this staging that is more concerned with the personalities behind the choreography than with whether or not the dancers are doing justice to the music. Indeed, there are elements in this staging that, in my own humble opinion, do more justice to the characters than can be found in most stagings of Bizet’s opera.

That said, there are any number of passages in which Shchedrin’s music is as naughty as it was when he first composed his score. Whether the music is performed for a ballet program or a concert setting (as will be the case for the next two days), the attentive listener will probably encounter any number of devices through which Shchedrin tickles the funny bone. Is it permissible to giggle? In a concert setting Shchedrin’s wit is right up there with the pranks of Joseph Haydn. Indeed, I am sure that Shchedrin would be more than satisfied with anything letting loose an LOL reaction!