CARMEN & ATTE KILPINEN 

In 1878 the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák took the living rooms of European music lovers by storm with his Slavonic Dances, a collection of four-hand piano pieces. With the orchestral arrangements published that same year, he consolidated his worldwide reputation as an unfailing composer of hits, whose music moves both the body and the emotions.

Rodion Shchedrin, who died last year at the age of 92, also approached music with a sense of humour. He adapted Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen into a dance work for his wife, the ballet legend Maya Plisetskaya. The arrangement for strings and percussion is full of evergreen favourites such as the Habanera, Seguidilla and March of the Toreadors, to which modern, exquisitely inventive twists add a playful kick. The fresh choreography he created for the Lahti Symphony Orchestra is danced by Atte Kilpinen, the Finnish National Ballet’s principal dancer, who is also well-known from television.