Pablo de Sarasate
CARMEN FANTASIE
Cigarette girl, passionate, tempestuous, mysterious: Bizet's Carmen is one of music's great heroines and one of the greatest operas ever written. Not that the first Paris audiences knew that in 1875 when they were at best indifferent and at worst downright hostile!
But they know now and join audiences worldwide in loving this music and watching many different productions and adaptations of it, with everything from the musical version Carmen Jones to a modern Russian ballet suite by Rodion Shchedrin to this adaption for violin and orchestra by Pablo de Sarasate.
Sarasate was one of the great violin virtuosos of the 19th century who had the likes of Bruch, Saint-Saëns, Lalo and Wienawski writing brilliant and exciting works for him. He often wrote flashy works for himself and he knew a good tune when he heard one - so the Carmen Fantasie is a great showpiece for violinists.
Carmen is an enthralling character, a reckless flirt and an extraordinarily passionate and independent woman. Sarasate may have based his themes on Bizet's opera but he is no slave to them: there is an introduction and four sections as he weaves through the moods of the tempestuous heroine - her passions, anger, love, betrayal, deceit and whimsy, keeping the soloist on her toes with enormous technical challenges.
Bernard Clarke, RTÉ lyric fm
IF YOU LIKED SARASATE'S CARMEN FANTASIE . . .
. . . you'll probably also enjoy these concerts in the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra's 2007/08 season, at the National Concert Hall or broadcast live on RTÉ lyric fm.
Ravel's sultry, smouldering Rapsodie espagnole, which climaxes in a wild, abandoned Feria, and the lush sensuality of Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain with pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, along with Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. To find out more, go to http://www.rte.ie/performinggroups/2008/0502/nso.html
More Spanish-flavoured virtuosity in Ravel's Alborada del gracioso - or 'Morning Song of a Jester', with his Shéhérazade (soprano Ailish Tynan) and Messiaen's Turangalîla-symphonie. To find out more, go to
http://www.rte.ie/performinggroups/2008/0222/nso.html
PABLO DE SARASATE, 1844-1908
Born in Pamplona, Sarasate began to learn the violin at the age of five from his father who was a military band leader, then went on to study in Madrid and Paris. (His mother died on their journey to Paris.) He toured Europe and North and South America, acclaimed for his virtuosity and beautiful sound. Wealthy and celebrated, according to George Bernard Shaw he left "criticism gasping miles behind him". Sarasate died of bronchitus in his home in Biarritz in France on September 28th 1908. He never married.
