Shostakovich: The Film Album
The Silly Little Mouse (instrumental version)[a]; Excerpts from the suites to the films Alone, Counterplan, The Gadfly, Great Citizen (Series 2), Hamlet, Pirogov, Sofia Perovskaya.
Riccardo Chailly, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.
Decca/London 289 460 792-2. DDD. TT 78:02.
Recording Grote Zaal, Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, 6, 19, 22 May, 10-11 September 1998.
World Première Recording [a].

Ricardo Chailly's spirited and stylish exploration of the light music of Shostakovich continues with yet another theme-oriented release of this abundant, highly diverting repertoire. The previous two issues in this series bear the self-explanatory titles, Jazz Music (Decca/London 433 702-2), and The Dance Album (London 452 597-2), and were quite well received in this venue and elsewhere. Chailly now turns his baton toward another genre with the third and possibly final entry of the set, The Film Album.

If expectations are high, they are not only due to the fact that a world class conductor, orchestra and record label are involved. On his previous two entries in the series, Chailly has assembled his programs and performances with meticulous care, offering world premières and alternate versions that have earned distinguished places in the catalogue. On The Dance Album, for example, he was the first to uncover the original rather than the standard Atovmyan-arranged version of Gadfly. That album also contains the slightly later 1934 version of The Bolt, and a specially arranged edition of Moscow Cheremoushki. Chailly has also been a lively and dedicated interpreter of this repertoire.

The current disc offers a broad cross-section of nine of the composer's film scores spanning an entire career, from the youthful Counterplan (1932) to the composer's penultimate cinematic work, Sofia Perovskaya (1967). It is also distinguished by world premières. One of them is a genuine specialty item, the instrumental arrangement of the cartoon-opera, The Silly Little Mouse, a work of Shostakovich's which has only recently been rescued from total obscurity.

The original "vocal version" of Silly Little Mouse was given its world première recording on the Citadel label (see review above) only a few months before the current release. Written for an animated short, it is a work that Testimony's Shostakovich took seriously enough to refer to repeatedly as an "opera". The cartoon is (or "was", pending the condition of the celluloid) based on a cat-and-mouse fairy tale by Samuel Marshak featuring a cast of - judging from the music - cuddly-looking animals with the illustrious names Mouse, Duck, Pig, Toad, Horse, and Cat. The comparison to Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, written three years earlier, is inevitable. Musically, the two works remain stylistically distinct, of course, but in the Prokofiev, each character is identified by their own individual tune. In the Shostakovich, the melodies are not character-specific. Amidst a variety of other musical material, each animal in turn sings an aria consisting of an individually altered form of one and the same tune.

In this recording, the arias are performed by solo instruments substituting for individual roles. The arrangement was approved by the Shostakovich estate and was especially prepared for this recording by Andrew Cornall, the producer of the current Chailly series. The instrumental stand-ins are written with much imagination and performed with plenty of personality. For example, the Toad is represented on a croaking double bass with backboard-slapping embellishments, the Horse with the trombone's inimitable slurs and raspberry toppings, and the Pig on a bleating bassoon with backup snorts on bass drum. It strikes me as insanely funny to be writing about Shostakovich's music in these terms, but it does reflect the music's storybook charm.

All the music, as far as I can hear, is fresh and not recycled from other sources. Though the current arrangement contains every note of the original score, the music is far too dependent on programmatic narrative to stand alone as abstract music. Its handful of merry little melodies alternate with each other in an operatic fashion, boasting just the right balance of sweetness and sophistication. Listeners will be surprised to hear how gentle and free of sarcasm Shostakovich can be throughout the entire 12-minute duration of this delightfully untypical work.

Mr. Chailly's other programming choices are typically unusual. I found it surprising that more than a fourth of the disc, twenty minutes to be exact, is devoted to the music from the film Alone. The conductor evidently found the music's alluring atmospheric qualities distinct enough among the composer's film scores to flesh out in more complete form. Nevertheless, some of the selections within the suite, such as the three-minute Altai movement and the first two and a half minutes of In Kuzmina's hut are questionable. These sections carry little more than atmospheric interest and are typical of the woodwind noodling found in the composer's other early film scores.

This is not the case for the rest of the suite. Some stunning special effects occur in the final four selections, especially Storm Breaks, wherein the howling wind is represented by an absolutely bizarre passage for theremin, trombone slides, and growling woodwinds, leading into Snow Storm's orchestral stampede. The brief section is such a stylistic departure (Artur Honegger's film music actually came to mind), it prompted immediate comparison with the corresponding tracks in a different recording. (Two alternate recordings are available of the complete, ca. 75-minute, Alone score, both from 1996, Michail Jurowski/Berlin RSO, Capriccio 10 562, and Walter Mnatsakanov/Byelorussian Radio, Russian Disc RD CD 10 007).

Other highlights of the suite include a delightfully off-centred March and Galop, the latter with an opening pentatonic-sounding xylophone tune suggestive of Gliere's recently staged Red Poppy. The Barrel organ waltz (not the same music as the Gadfly movement often identified by the same title) is a pensive little dance that acquires its personality by periodically being offset by a series of dissonant snarls on muted brass. Calm after the Storm, reminiscent of Prokofiev's eerie evocations, brings the suite to a quiet, highly atmospheric conclusion.

The powerful music that Shostakovich's wrote for Grigory Kozintsev's film, Hamlet, is often cited as Shostakovich's greatest work in the genre. Along with the suite to Gadfly, it is also one of the most frequently recorded. Given the time of its composition (1963-64), its concentration of dark forces, and the gestural quality of its material, it is one of the earliest compositions that looks ahead to the style and content of the late period. When I saw Chailly conduct Hamlet extracts at New York's Avery Fisher Hall on February 14th of this year, I can only blame hall acoustics for my having been less impressed than I am with the superb performance and recorded sound on the current disc. Once again, Chailly's selections offer surprises.

The potent introduction, with its accented hammer blows and reverberant gong strokes, has never seemed so monumental nor been recorded in such opulent sound. Other familiar selections include the nervously scurrying strings of Ball at the castle, with its Tchaikovskian brass two-step in the trio section, brought off with superb sectional playing. I could have done without yet another performance of the blandly polite In the Garden, considering the omission of such fine movements as the grandiose invocation of The Ghost. Another movement whose absence I regret, and one of the most poignant of the score, is the morbid mini-portrait of Ophelia, whose mournfully lovely melody, her sanity, eerily dissolves into hollow gesture. It would have been nice to hear the Chailly version of these numbers. Compensating that is the inclusion of a few brief, nonstandard fragments, Ball and Military Music, that flesh out the Shakespearian ambiance with boisterous pageantry.

Chailly concludes the Hamlet selections with one of Shostakovich's finest, most engaging cinematic segments, the mighty Scene of poisoning. It is one of the composer's obsessively driven ostinato affairs, a smaller cousin to the Eighth Symphony's Allegro non troppo, where developmental drive, atmospheric foreboding, and motivic interplay are amalgamated in an uncommonly riveting fashion. The one performance of this movement that has always seemed ideal is the Nikolai Rabinovich/Moscow RSO from an old ten-inch mono Melodiya LP (D 17691-2; 1966). The brisk, unflaggingly strict (thus, Mravinsky-like) metronome that is carried throughout the entire ostinato section is precisely what the piece needs to achieve its building sense of accumulation. As subsequent recordings of this movement have demonstrated, deviations from that strictly metred pulse can derail the momentum and detract from the piece's overall effectiveness. (Some readers may find the following discussion of this four minutes of music excessive. They are advised to skip the next few paragraphs).

I found this to be the case with Serebrier's/RTBF idiosyncratic tempo changes during the climactic section where the tension momentarily becomes dislodged in an otherwise effective performance (RCA 74321 242122). Leonid Grin/Berlin RSO (Capriccio 10 298) score high atmospheric points in the first part of the movement and finally arrive at a very effective target tempo. However, their ostinato begins and stays slow for too long, sacrificing much of the piece's cohesiveness. Paul Freeman's best moments (with the Chicago Sinfonietta, Fanfare CDD 551) come early in the piece, with wonderfully expectant seismic thunderings in the bass drum, an instrument which thereafter makes unfortunately thumpy contributions in a recording that suffers from less than ideal acoustical distribution.

Having been fussy over performances of this movement in past recordings, I was no less than floored to find Chailly's interpretation (as well as recorded sound) brilliantly on target. He clearly understands the importance of following the unwritten axiom of keeping an unyielding tempo throughout the piece. His ostinato begins with one bar of slower tempo carried over from the introductory material (track 21, 2:22). He falls immediately into a steady sprint (2:28) that is a bit slower than the norm, but one that strikes a successful balance between mood and motion. He unblinkingly follows the metronome throughout the various thematic inserts that are both atmospheric and momentum-maintaining (3:11 to 3:35) and through the statement of the main theme in parallel minor seconds on the winds (3:39) - places where other conductors have made poor tempo decisions. At 4:55, Chailly steps up the pace in his one and only tempo shift that leads, with enormous effectiveness, to the three punctuated chords that culminate the climactic section (5:44). Significantly, Chailly maintains the new metronome through to the last bar. A good move. This follow-through not only leaves intact the spell created by the unwaveringly steady pulse, but reinforces the overreaching sense of inevitability. Leonard Grin, by contrast, who markedly steps up the pace in the post-climactic pages, breaks the spell with lesser results.

The three extracts from the film Counterplan are an altogether different kettle of fish. This is the score that gave us one of Shostakovich's most frequently arranged and recycled tunes which has gone by a variety of names over the years: Song of the Counterplan, Song of Unity, Song of Meeting, Morning Light, and was even arranged during the war as the United Nations Hymn. In its current instrumental form, the celebrated tune begins quietly on solo flute after which the rest of the orchestra leads it to a high-spirited conclusion. To my knowledge, no other parts of the Counterplan music have been previously recorded, though I am positive that I have heard elsewhere the music of the opening Presto, with its typical early-period stream of mischief. The second movement, Andante, features a lovely violin reverie.

What a wonderfully offbeat choice from the late-period film, Sofia Perovskaya, is its Felliniesque Waltz, a carousel tune that wears a bitter smirk, its twisted melancholy perfectly realized by Chailly and forces. With the simplicity of its minor key melody combined with its leisurely paced brass setting (an ensemble itself suggestive of a Russian funeral), the piece dangles ironically between circus and funeral music. While listening, I couldn't help associating it with the photo of the composer in his open casket with that erratic indentation of a smile streaked across his face.

The disc also contains two extracts from the Zhdanov-era film, Pirogov. One is a "bottle-smashing" Scherzo that must reflect the composer's pent-up hostility against his then persecutors and the very piece of cinematic mediocrity he was working on. Chailly goes one better than Jose Serebrier and the RTBF (RCA 6603-2-RC) in hurtling the hellfire needed in this splendidly reckless rouser (one with a double cadence of a kind found nowhere else in the DDS files). Yet this is one place on the disc where the maestro is exceeded by the well-suited excesses of Maxim Shostakovich and his rambunctious reading with the Bolshoi Theater Orchestra. That performance can only be heard on a Melodiya LP and its various vinyl reissues (in the West on Angel/Melodiya SR 40160; 1978), all of which are long out of print. Inexplicably and lamentably, Maxim's fine, pre-defection era recordings of a variety of his father's ballet and film scores have never been digitally reissued - Michurin being one of the few, if only, exceptions.

The other Pirogov extract is the Finale, a solidly crafted chorale hymn that is gradually brought, Soviet brass-and-percussion style, from solemnity to a rousing chest-pounding finale. It is the kind of indentured hackwork that prompts us to sympathize with the composer's post-war political conflagrations. At the same time, it is damned effective stuff, especially in this conductor's hands.

The disc also contains the Gadfly Romance. Yes, I'm afraid it's turned up once more, the "Riley, Ace of Spies" theme. One is perfectly justified in crying Not Again!, not only because the work verges on overexposure, but because Chailly includes the same music on his previously released Dance Album. On The Film Album, it does receive a greater amount of expressive detail by comparison, thanks to solo violinist Alexander Kerr, in addition to containing a minute more of repeated material (but not the extended central section included on Emin Khachaturyan's superb recording of Gadfly). How much fuss, then, can one raise over such a lovely piece and performance?

The Funeral March from The Great Citizen (Series 2, 1938-39) is kind of a preliminary sketch for the slow movement of the Eleventh Symphony that Shostakovich would write eighteen years later. Both pieces are based on the revolutionary song You Gave your Lives in Fatal Battle; both are in ternary form; and in both pieces, the dignity of the quoted song is reserved for the mournful outer sections which surround a heroic central climax. The climactic material in this case differs from that used in the Symphony's movement (wherein the "1905" motto theme makes its most dramatic appearance). Chailly delivers a beautifully moving interpretation of this march with grief-stricken sensitivity, steering the music's ebb and flow from hushed beginnings to central peak and back again with arresting effect.

The performance of the Funeral March epitomizes the complete empathy and meticulous care with which Chailly has assembled his interpretations for each of the pieces on this disc. It also reflects the admirable affinity that the conductor has demonstrated for a wide expressive range of the composer's incidental music. At the aforementioned New York concert, the conductor told me that Film Music probably would be the last entry in the current series. One is naturally led to wondering about Chailly's potential with more substantial Shostakovich fare. He certainly has raised the performance quality of the composer's light music to a new standard, as London records has likewise raised the quality of recorded sound in this repertoire. It would be a pity if their collaboration stopped here.

Louis Blois
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DSCH No. 11.
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