Is there a well-known classical music masterpiece that hasn’t been arranged, deconstructed, abridged, mangled, parodied, jazz-arranged, or pop songed? Think “What’s Opera, Doc?” or “The Rabbit of Seville”. How about Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 transformed into Duke Ellington’s “Ebony Rhapsody”, Chopin’s Fantasie-Impromptu rewritten as “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows”, the disco hit “A Fifth of Beethoven”, all of “Hooked on Classics”, or (God help us) “Kazooed on Classics”? The list is endless. Naturally Ravel’s “greatest hit” Bolero hasn’t been spared, and RCA gives us a disc’s worth of bowdlerized Boleri, bookended by two standard (i.e., “legit”) orchestral performances.
Isao Tomita’s abridged synthesizer rendition pans the snare drum back and forth between speakers, replete with brightly-lit keyboard patches that Genesis or Yes fans will love. A nifty piano duet version by Jacques Fray and Mario Braggiotti spice up Ravel’s harmonies with jazzy chord changes worthy of, well, Ravel! There’s a quaint and creaky Rumba rendition by Nathaniel Shilkret and his Orchestra, plus a more sophisticated and inventive swing chart featuring Benny Goodman’s big band. Arthur Fiedler leads the Boston Pops Orchestra in an arrangement that simply cuts out half the music. If you didn’t know the original, you wouldn’t notice anything askew.
Morton Gould revamps Bolero in the form of a three-and-a-half-minute solo piano tour-de-force–and plays the bejebers out of it. Sonny Kompanek’s arrangement for the Canadian Brass gets maximum textural and timbral mileage from the brass quintet instrumentation. Evelyn Glennie’s contribution tames Ravel’s sultry peaks down to easy listening size. The collection ends with Eduardo Mata leading the Dallas Symphony in a languorous, softly contoured reading at opposite ends of the red-hot Charles Munch/Boston Symphony reference version that opens the disc. In short, Bolero lovers will enjoy this fun and well-thought-out project. But why doesn’t RCA provide full discographical information? [7/12/2004]
