Best of Bizet

This delightful selection from Naxos where, as usual, the playing, conducting and recorded sound cannot be faulted, is topped and tailed by the third and fourth movements of Bizet's 'Symphony in C' that he composed at the age of seventeen. In between are, amongst others, the best known bits of 'Carmen', 'The Pearl Fishers' and the 'L'Arlesienne Suites'. The music on this collection, with it's catchy melodic invention tied to sudden, serendipitous changes in tempo and pitch, harkens back to one of the fathers of French music, Jean-Philippe Rameau.