Movie Madness
Extracts from Alone, opus 26; The Golden Mountains, opus 30; The Maxim Trilogy, Opp. 41(i), 45, 50; King Lear, opus 58a; Zoya, opus 64; The Fall of Berlin, opus 82; The Gadfly, opus 97; Five Days Five Nights, opus 111; Hamlet, opus 116.
Michail Jurowski, James Judd, Leonid Grin (conductors), Svetlana Katchur (soprano), Vladimir Kazachuk (tenor), RIAS Chamber Choir, Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra.
Capriccio 10 822. DDD. TT 64:52.

DSCH doesn't usually review compilations of the Favourite Shostakovich variety, but this one is worth making an exception for if only because it allows a quick canter through some discs that were released before the journal ran regular reviews.

Movie Madness is the title and (almost) all the tracks are from Capriccio's series of Shostakovich film scores, hence the "Movie". Quite where the "Madness" comes from (apart from an amusing alliterativeness and an alarming front cover photograph) I'm not sure. There are four tracks from The Gadfly, three from The Fall of Berlin, two each from The Maxim Trilogy and Hamlet and one each from Alone, The Golden Mountains, Zoya and Five Days Five Nights plus one other (of which more later). But no suite appears in full and the tracks have been shuffled so that no two consecutive ones are from the same film. I got the feeling that there was half an idea to produce a three-part "pseudo suite": tracks 1 to 6, 7 to 10, and 11 to 16.

The Prelude from The Fall of Berlin may not be Shostakovich's greatest, but it is an effective if bombastic opener, and the mood is lightened by following it with the Folk Feast from The Gadfly before returning to The Fall of Berlin for In the Garden, a pleasant pastorale for chorus and orchestra. This is followed by the jokey Waltz from The Maxim Trilogy and the solemn Song of Cordelia, not from the film King Lear but from the wartime stage production (the original disc, Capriccio 10 397, has excerpts from both). Continuing the Shakespearean theme is the scurrying Ball at the Palace from Hamlet but the mood is rudely broken by the wonderfully exuberant Prologue from The Youth of Maxim, with a great contribution from Svetlana Chatter (sorry, Katchur) recounting her adventures as a football player but above all the cunning and witty interweaving of Oira Polka, the Karowiak and Black Eyes. The light-hearted mood continues with the Waltz from The Golden Mountains and the Galop from The Gadfly; these three are amongst Shostakovich's most enjoyable light pieces, and even if the March from Zoya has more than a hint of Tchaikovsky at his most overblown, it does bring this "scherzo" section of the disc to a neat and rousing close.

The clash of styles between the next two tracks - The Gadfly's affectingly sentimental Introduction and the more free-wheelingly ironic Galop from Alone - is jarring; one definitely feels the 25 year gap. For the earlier film, Vladimir Kazachuk has but one line to repeatedly sing, "Kakaya khoroshaya budet zhizn" ("How Good Life Will Be"), but invests it with such feeling as is possible. Oddly, Alone and Hamlet in some ways seem closer despite the 34 year gap as, with In the Garden, Shostakovich recaptures some of his youthful lightness, working on his beloved text to produce an ironically coy contredanse. Liberated Dresden from Five Days Five Nights gives him a chance to interpolate a huge chunk of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, but however appropriate, I can't help thinking it was also a time-saver on this, one of his weaker scores. The original double set (Capriccio 10 341/2) came with New Babylon and it's frustrating that that score is unrepresented here.

No disc of Shostakovich film-score highlights would be complete without the Romance from The Gadfly, and it duly turns up as a kind of intermezzo between the freeing of Dresden and The Fall of Berlin, or, to be more precise, The Storming of the Zeyelovsky Heights, which, though a disappointingly one-dimensional piece to end with, recalls some of the themes from the start of the disc, bringing it to a quasi-symphonic close.

The whole of the Capriccio series has been enjoyably well-played and recorded; hopefully their work will continue, and perhaps even be spurred by the publication of several film scores in the forthcoming new Collected Works edition. As a sampler, this is a good disc showing many of Shostakovich's sides (given the limitation to a single genre), though maybe a better approach would have been to group pieces from each score to make "mini-suites". Ordered chronologically, this might have made a more illuminating introduction, though Uwe Kraemer's primer-level notes - which only mention the film scores in the final paragraph - would have to be expanded. Even as they stand, they say nothing about any of the films represented. Having said that, this is a well-planned, played and recorded disc, and for anyone who only wants to dip a toe into Shostakovich's film scores it's particularly useful.

John Riley
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