Shostakovich: Jazz Suites Nos. 1 - 2 / The Bolt / Tahiti Trot

Description

Dmitry Shostakovich (1906-1975)The Bolt (Ballet Suite) • Jazz Suites Nos. 1 and 2 • Tahiti TrotAlthough the symphonies, string quartets and concertos represent the core of his achievement, Shostakovich had wide sympathies across the musical spectrum: hence his oft-repeated comment that he enjoyed all music from Bach to Offenbach. Moreover, the revival in recent years of such works as his 1958 musical Moscow-Cheryomushki attests to a composer who entered into the spirit of ‘light music’ with enjoyment and enthusiasm. All of the works on this disc will come as a surprise to those who know Shostakovich only as a concert composer in the Beethovenian tradition. Shostakovich’s three ballet scores belong to his early radical years, roughly 1926 to 1934, when he was working in a variety of media while, perhaps not altogether consciously, avoiding the symphonic domain he was later to make his own. After the short-lived success of his first ballet The Golden Age (1930), he completed its follow-up, The Bolt, less than six months later. Produced at Leningrad’s Kirov Theatre on 8th April 1931, Fyodor Lopukhov’s scenario of industrial espionage was the pretext for music drawing on circus-like farce and the constructivism made notorious by Stravinsky and Prokofiev’s work for the Ballets Russes in Paris. Despite, or perhaps because of, its topical quality, the USSR being in the midst of Stalin’s first Five Year Plan, The Bolt closed after only a handful of performances, and was never revived as such in the composer’s lifetime. Shostakovich duly prepared a suite of eight movements from the ballet, given its first performance by Alexander Gauk and the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra on 17th January 1933. Shostakovich discarded two movements prior to publication a year later (in this form, the piece became known as Ballet Suite No. 5, following on from the four suites prepared by Levon Antovmyan from the composer’s stage music in the early 1950s), but the present recording resorts to the original order. Following the Introduction, a thunderous overture with more than an affectionate side-swipe at Tchaikovsky’s ballet music, the polka of The Bureaucrat gives the bassoon a starring rôle in its high jinks. The Drayman’s Dance is a brief sequence of variations on a full-blooded theme, very much in the style of folk-ballets such as Gliere’s The Red Poppy. Kozelkov’s Dance with Friends looks rather to the popular dances of the decadent Western bourgeoisie, notably the tango, for its representation of the villains of the ballet. Intermezzo is a strutting rhythmic piece, with a more rhapsodic central section, of the type familiar from Shostakovich’s theatre and film scores. Dance of the Colonial Slave-Girl is another folk-inspired number, alternatively moody and frenetic, while The Conciliator has a circus-like gaiety, thanks to a scintillating display from solo xylophone. Th