This extremely well played and vividly recorded disc offers an excellent overview of Shostakovich’s work as a film composer. More importantly, it relates his output in this much-maligned genre to his work in more “serious” music more clearly than does any other similarly focused collection. As such, it should be heard whole, for the total impression then becomes very much more than the sum of its parts, revealing how a great composer manages to write music that serves its admittedly utilitarian purpose while also remaining (mostly) true to himself.
The collection opens with music from the Maxim trilogy (1935-39), a series of films depicting the (wholly beneficial) effects of communism and the revolution on a sort of Russian “everyman”. The music, typical Socialist Realism, finds room for some marvelous cues, including a charming “Waltz” and the fabulously exciting “Struggle at the Barricades”. Here we meet the composer of the Leningrad Symphony, bold and colorful, though it’s surely significant that the longest track in the suite is “The Death of the Old Worker”, and the loud (but brief) finale arises out of a very effective “Funeral March”. Next comes a suite drawn from The Man with a Gun (1938), a theoretically inspiring film about the transfiguring experience of a soldier’s meeting with Lenin. Noisy, empty, and shamelessly pandering, it lives in the world of the much later terrible Twelfth Symphony, another abortive attempt on the part of the composer to celebrate the founders of Soviet Communism.
Moving back to 1931, A Girl Alone (also called simply “Alone” on previous recordings) reveals the youthful composer’s style before his first traumatic run-in with Soviet officialdom over the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The piquant wind writing and high-kicking final “Gallop” recall the early ballets and symphonies up to No. 4. Finally, in the music for King Lear (1970), we encounter late Shostakovich pure and simple. The music, a couple of moderatos with the balance of cues marked “Adagio”, sounds as desolate and poignant as anything in the late quartets or the Fifteenth Symphony, while the final track, a solo for E-flat clarinet called “The Fool”, sums up in 52 seconds all that is most arresting and disturbing about this complex, tormented composer. As noted above, superb performances and sound cap a disc whose innocuous surface quickly reveals profound and fascinating depths. [2/8/03]
