This disc may be aimed more at the Shostakovich completist, but it’s no less wonderful for that. The Girlfriends is a major film score dating from the same time in the 1930s as the scandal surrounding Stalin’s denunciation of the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District. Scored lightly, for string quartet, piano, trumpet, and larger forces only in a couple of numbers, the music is mostly lyrical, attractive, and (given the composer and the period) remarkably sensitive. Some of it had to be reconstructed from the actual film soundtrack, but conductor Mark Fitz-Gerald has done his job excellently, and he leads a sensitive and cogent performance of the 23 brief movements that comprise the complete score.
Rule, Britannia! and Salute to Spain both fall into the composer’s Socialist Realist hackwork, but I have to confess that the music is fun: brash, often militant, noisy, and unashamedly populist. The former strongly recalls the musical language of the Third Symphony, only it’s less garish and more tuneful. There seems to be some confusion concerning one of the songs in Salute to Spain, “Miy Idyom”, which means “We are going [on foot]” but that the note-writer translates for some strange reason as “My Idiom”. In any case, no one knows what song was actually intended for the stage production, so an anti-Fascist Spanish Civil War song makes an appropriate substitute. Fitz-Gerald’s conducting is really exciting in these two suites, and the orchestral playing is excellent as well.
Potentially the most interesting item here is the six-and-one-half-minute incomplete movement of what Shostakovich originally planned as his Ninth Symphony. Fans of the composer will recognize one of the themes as a loud version of the Tenth Symphony’s first-movement second subject (the limping waltz for clarinet). As for the rest, it’s clear why Shostakovich abandoned his initial effort: the remaining ideas (or should I say “idea”, as there’s only one) are uninteresting, the music uniformly loud and heavily scored. Still, as I said, this is a disc for connoisseurs, and you can only admire the composer’s self-discipline in scrapping this effort in favor of the delightful Ninth Symphony we all know and love. Go for it. [6/1/2009]
