Shostakovich Before the Wrath of Stalin

Once again I have Naxos to thank for allowing me to catch up on recordings from the past that still deserve attention. Some readers may recall that, at the end of last month, I wrote about Tianwa Yang’s four-CD box set of the complete works composed by Pablo de Sarasate for violin and orchestra. This morning I want to shift my attention to an album of works composed by Dmitri Shostakovich prior to his first confrontation with the wrath of Joseph Stalin in January of 1936.

Cover of the album being discussed (from its Amazon.com Web page)

The album, released by Naxos, has no title as such, but most of it is devoted to two compositions given the title Suite for Jazz Orchestra. Presumably, Shostakovich knew about jazz as a genre. I have no idea whether he ever heard jazz performed in the Soviet Union. My guess is that it is unlikely, whether it involved recordings or “live” experiences. However, we know that he was aware of at least one American composer in that genre, Vincent Youmans. We know this because his Opus 16 is a faithful transcription of Youmans’ “Tea for Two,” which was first performed on November 25, 1928 and quickly became popular to Soviet music lovers!

This probably emboldened Shostakovich to compose two further compositions given the title Jazz Suite, the first with three movements and the second with eight. This then led to his Opus 27, composed for the ballet The Bolt, described on its Wikipedia page as “an ironic tale of slovenly work in a Soviet factory.” As might be expected, this did not go down well with the Soviet authorities; and it was probably one of the key factors in provoking Stalin’s wrath. While the ballet was not performed again until 2005, an eight-movement suite was extracted from the score and shows up in the Shostakovich catalog as his fifth ballet suite.

The selections on this album were performed by the Russian State Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Dmitry Yablonsky. The album was originally released in 2002 after having been recorded in the Moscow State Broadcasting and Recording House the previous October, but the music itself was already surfacing at the end of the last century. We know this because Stanley Kubrick took the second waltz from the second Jazz Suite and endowed it with a significant place in the musical setting for his film Eyes Wide Shut. (That was how I first came to know this music.) This was a few decades after Mikhail Gorbachev became the Soviet General Secretary, and artists in the Soviet Union could enjoy the advantages of glasnost and perestroika. Since Shostakovich died in 1975, he could never appreciate that his ventures into jazzy rhetoric no longer provoked Soviet authorities.

Fortunately, Naxos has made it available for us to enjoy that rhetoric without fear of sinister forces looking over our shoulders!