Dmitri Shostakovich - The Film Album

The films Shostakovich was scoring somehow sought legitimacy or outright approval from Soviet power regimes, but as in all his music, Shostakovich enacted subtle subversions. The parade-step march cadences of The Counterplan are exaggerated just enough to integrate all kinds of conflicting dark undertows, emphasized coyly by Chailly and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. The excerpts from Alone are all over the map, spooky and turbulent and bleak in equal measures, in answer to so many mandated bright, blasting musical ventures elsewhere in the Soviet cultural regime. The works continue until 1967, with a twisty waltz from Sofia Perovskaya, which seems more like a distant comment on the notion of a dance piece than music scripted for dance. For its mix of big, lit sweeps and minute, shadowy motions, this is one of the best single-CD Shostakovich sets–themed or not–in print.

–Andrew Bartlett (Amazon)

Excerpts from:

Counterplan (The Passer-by), film score, Op. 33
Alone (All Alone), film score, Op. 26
The Silly Little Mouse, animated film score, Op. 56
Hamlet, film score, Op. 116
The Great Citizen II, film score, Op. 55
Sofia Perovskaya, film score, Op. 132
Pirogov, suite from the film score, Op. 76a
The Gadfly, suite from the film score, Op. 97a


Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam

Riccardo Chailly