SHOSTAKOVICH: Film Music
The Golden Mountains, suite, Op. 30a[a]; Tale of a Priest and His Worker Balda, Op. 36; Adventures of Korzinkina, Op. 59; The Silly Little Mouse, Op. 56, one-act children's opera[b].
Walter Mnatsakanov, Belarus RTV Symphony Orchestra;State Cinematographic Symphony Orchestra[a], Yevgenia Kazantseva (soprano - Mouse, Little Mouse)[b], Leslia Liut (soprano - Cat)[b], Nina Tishina (mezzo-soprano - Duck)[b], Sergei Schapov (tenor - Horse)[b], Oleg Gordinets (baritone - Pig)[b], Mikhail Druzhina (bass - Toad, Dog)[b], Antinina Ivanova (narrator)[b].
Citadel CTD 88129. DDD. TT 62:24.
Recorded Mosfilm studios April 1997[a]; the SKAT Studios, Minsk, February 1997[all others].
World première recording[b].

Devotees of the irreverent musical escapades of Shostakovich's youth will not be disappointed with this colorful cross section of his pre-War contributions to the cinema. The disc also has the distinguishing feature of calling attention to two significant yet unacknowledged operatic works, one a world première, that may revise our assessment of the composer's work in that genre. This programme of rarely and never-before recorded scores is performed by two Byelorussian ensembles led by the resilient Walter Mnatsakanov. Since 1994, Mnatsakanov has emerged as something of a specialist of Shostakovich's film music, having since filled at least four Russian Disc CDs with this esoteric repertoire. Here he returns on the Citadel label with a period-bound programme of four scores spanning the years 1931 to 1940.

Two of these scores are the result of the composer's work in the unlikely genre of the animated cartoon and are more than passing curiosities: the instrumental suite from Tale of a Priest and His Servant, Balda (1934), and the attention-grabbing world première recording, in complete form, of The Silly Little Mouse (1939).

What is more surprising than Shostakovich's double dalliance in the world of the animated cartoon is the remarkable fondness with which the composer/Volkov speaks of these scores in Testimony (p. 19): "I wrote two small operas for [the film director Mikhail] Tsekhanovsky. They're listed as music for cartoons, but actually the films were made for my music, real operas, small…. There was a lot of music. Too bad it's all been lost somewhere."

Not only does the composer express regret over the loss of the scores, both of which have been fully recovered, but he regards them well enough to repeatedly refer to them as operas. Let me repeat that last word: operas! The significance of this statement is greater than first meets the eye. It is very telling from a composer whose serious operatic ambitions were crushed beyond repair in the infamous political aftermath of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1934). And telling for the fact until now the only post-Lady Macbeth opera that has been generally acknowledged is the unfinished The Gamblers.

It is a hard to believe that there are in existence two Shostakovich operas in the comic genre that have until this time remained in the shadows. They are not even mentioned in such major surveys as Boris Schwarz's (1983) or Elizabeth Wilson's (1994). Fortunately, for at least one of these works, the current disc makes a welcome rescue for the cause.

As one of only a few works of Shostakovich's written expressly for children (another one being the Op. 69 Children's Notebook for solo piano; see review above), Silly Little Mouse takes its place in the composer's catalogue as a delightfully unjaded excursion into the light opera category. The fifteen-minute drama is based on a Samuel Marshak fairy tale about a mouselet whose chronic insomnia attracts the help of various creatures - a duck, a pig, a toad, a horse, and finally, a cat - each of whom takes a turn crooning the mouselet to sleep. In the end, the protagonist must be rescued from the jaws of the cat, whose ulterior motives are concealed behind his singularly successful serenade. The narrated story, along with its zoological cast and musical character shadings, invites inevitable comparison to Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf (1936), written three years earlier and which evidently was still lurking in Shostakovich's imagination.

Although the score is full of Shostakovich's fingerprints, listeners may be surprised by its disarming innocence and total absence of the usual sarcastic assaults and inflections. Instead the music is handled with the benevolent restraint of a relatively new father (Maxim was a year old and Galya three at the time of its composition) and seems exceedingly well-judged for children. It is music that is genuinely charming, warm, and witty, with enough sophistication to keep an adult entertained and amused after repeated hearings.

The drama unfolds in a single, unbroken stream of music, the composer's only film score to do so, and is built around the recurring lullaby, individually modified, that each of the animals sings in turn. Though the score was thought lost, Shostakovich was not one to let an idea go to waste as the lullaby tune reappears in the final song, Kreutzer Sonata, of the composer's 1960 vocal cycle Satires. The cast delivers a lively performance with enthusiastic players who convey all the unadulterated purity called for by the music. Silly Little Mouse is clearly a major little discovery. I predict that record producers will not take long to discover the marketing possibilities of pairing Shostakovich's Mouse with Prokofiev's Wolf as classic discmates for children.

The composer's other work in this genre, Tale of a Priest and His Assistant, Balda, is another matter altogether, its length and ambition well exceeding that of Silly Mouse. The 15-minute instrumental suite that appears on this disc is extracted from a 45-minute version, with narrator and soloists, that appeared on a 1984 Melodiya LP (C10 19323 008). That in turn is an arrangement of the full, never-recorded (and evidently never performed), 75-minute performing version as indicated on the musical score. It is by length alone far too important a Shostakovich work to remain unrecorded to this day.

The story is based on Pushkin's folk tale, written in rhyme, and set to music in between the completion of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and the commencement of the Fourth Symphony. Unfortunately Tale of a Priest would become one of the political casualties of the time, having been banned and halted in production during the same month as the withdrawal of the Fourth Symphony (December 1936). The edited-down 45-minute LP version - and I must be one of the few lucky ones to actually own it - is a self-contained musical drama that is presented as a connected series of songs, arias and choruses. The tunes are so fresh and ingratiating and the pace so unflaggingly lively, I am tempted to call Tale of a Priest the yet-undiscovered jewel of the composer's work in opera comique - the genre in which Shostakovich showed such promise in the experimental The Nose and left sadly unfulfilled in the unfinished The Gamblers. (The finished portion of Gamblers suffers from a principal flaw in that it unfolds as an ongoing series of recitatives with few, if any, dramatic landmarks. Oddly, this work has received repeated recording attention in the face of the almost total obscurity of Tale…).

The instrumental suite offers a tuneful cross-section of the work's madcap exuberance. The opening Overture's instrumental slides, slurs and flamboyantly off-centre scale runs charge the air with peerless Shostakovian satire. Titter-triggering highlights include the Nocturnal Procession's blustering brass lead-in, from which follows a devastatingly petty xylophone variant and equally nonchalant curtseys on piccolo and harp. In Balda's Dialogue, a volley of insistent trombone slides make a positively uncivilized appearance. I fail to see any significant stylistic similarities to Weill's 1928 Threepenny Opera as mentioned in the liner notes, though there is a melodic resemblance in the sixth number, Dream, to the Ballad of Immoral Earnings from Act Two of the Weill score. Shostakovich's sentimental tune could very well have been served up straight-laced and slightly drippy. Yet in its unlikely orchestration, featuring saxophone and guitar, framed by a dissonantly bleating chorus of bassoons, all reduces to a splendidly anti-Romantic serenade (one that returns with equal blather, featuring solo trumpet, in Ballet Suite No. 2 of 1951).

The music to Adventures of Korzinkina is yet another sparkling score from the composer's youthful cinematic gallery. It is the last piece of music written by the composer before the sobering effects of the war, and from what I can surmise, marks the farewell work in that campy-grotesque style so roguishly represented in the youthful ballet scores of the 1930s. After Korzinkina, the composer's light music loses its tendency toward distortion and oddball instrumental effects in favor of a more stable lyrical style.

The short Overture and the rib-nudging Restaurant Music movements show the earlier tendencies still very much in force. The latter movement is one of the most wryly twisted morsels ever wrought by the composer, as tuba, high winds and other soloists engage in smarmily derisive, oompah-driven commentary that never lets the listener off the hook. The second movement, March, would seem a fairly straightforward military band ditty were it not for the quirky dissonances peppered throughout. The brief Finale, featuring a chorus singing the syllables "nana", is a surprising moment of melancholy, rare in the composer's output, whose 90-second existence is far too short given the dreamy quality of the tune.

But the potboiler of the Korzinkina Suite is the third movement, Chase, whose title aptly describes the kind of heart-racing cinematic activity for which this foot-stomping whirligig, scored only for two pianos, is tailored. It is surprising that this high profile polka has not already become as independently infamous as its acerbic cousin from The Age of Gold.

Finally, we arrive at one of the composer's earliest film scores, The Golden Mountains. The two movements that give the suite its musical stamp of distinction are the mighty organ Fugue and the variously arranged and recorded Waltz. It's easy to understand the popularity of the delightful waltz. Its tune and accompaniment are very much in the Tchaikovskian mold, though cast in a distinctly Shostakovian instrumentation that includes the unlikely pairing of harmonium and Hawaiian guitar. (Enthusiasts will know the latter instrument's only other appearance in the catalogue, the subsequent Jazz Suite No. 1 of 1934).

The Fugue for organ and orchestra is one of the composer's most impressive cinematic compositions with a developmental heft and intricacy that has few peers in the genre of film music (Walton's Spitfire Prelude and Fugue comes to mind as an ally). After an introductory flourish, the fugue commences as a stream of vertiginously careening eighth notes, its amorphously defined subject designed not so much for articulated argument as for providing a platform of demonically driven energy. The overlays of monstrously heroic brass fanfares and percussion provide the rhythmic muscle that eventually propels the music, with surprising symphonic breadth, to a genuinely hair-raising climactic finale. Though it never reaches quite the same degree of fury, it prefigures the titanic fugue of the Fourth Symphony's first movement. With its corresponding evocation of overweening complexity and motion, the organ fugue is a true child of the Age of Futurism, which within the same time bracket had produced such landmark representatives as Mosolov's Iron Foundry and Shostakovich's own Second, Third and Fourth Symphonies. It is a work that still raises hackles as it surely must have when Golden Mountains was first released in 1931.

With the exception of Silly Little Mouse, the three other film suites have been previously recorded by Gennady Rozhdestvensky on a BMG "Twofer" reviewed elsewhere in these pages. Those première recordings made in the 1980s still bear the stamp of Rozhdestvensky's authority over this repertoire when that conductor was doing his best work.

While Mnatsakanov's tempi tend not to be as brisk as the elder conductor's, there is no compromise of wit or liveliness throughout these fine Byelorussian performances. In the organ fugue Mnatsakanov's tempo is actually faster, gaining him a distinct edge over his predecessor in capturing that movement's manic grandiosity, with kudos to organist Alexander Nazaruk. Of the two other notable recordings of the Golden Mountains Suite by Jose Serebrier with the Belgian RSO (BMG 60226-2-RC) and Michail Jurowski with the Berlin RSO (Capriccio 10 561), the lively, distinctive performance of the fugue with Serebrier and organist Karol Golebiowski should be noted.

The new Citadel disc has the added feature of including the 4-minute Balda's Dialogue (discussed above), from the Tale of a Priest, a movement missing on the BMG "Twofer". In the Korzinkina suite, the rousing Chase movement gets a fiery going-over by duo pianists Irina Kolesnikova and Nina Kavetskaya, if they are ever so slightly exceeded in spunk by the unidentified piano team on the Rozhdestvensky recording. The one movement that has to be singled out as paling by comparison is Restaurant Music, whose wit relies upon split-second reactive timing, so sharply executed by Rozhdestvensky, yet somehow lost by Mnatsakanov's deliberated pacing. One less-than-perfect track out of a total of nineteen is not bad at all.

Sound on these triple digital recordings is quite fine, though I thought I detected evidence of dynamic compression - still utilized on some classical radio stations these days - at a number of volume peaks during the Silly Little Mouse track. These amounted to very minor distractions that are far outweighed by the many performance and production assets, rounded out by only adequate liner notes, throughout the entire disc. That and the auspicious world première recording of Silly Little Mouse add up to a CD that is highly entertaining for the interested listener and no less than mandatory for the serious Shostakovich follower. Now that the cat is out of the bag, one hopes that an unabridged, full production recording of Tale of a Priest will not be long to follow.

Louis Blois
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DSCH No. 11.
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