DMITRY SHOSTAKOVICH

The latest release in Chandos’ successful Film Music series is the third volume dedicated to the film scores of Dmitri Shostakovich.

Shostakovich’s film scores are characteristic of his music at its best; full of good tunes, atmosphere, invention, colour and energy.

This unique programme contains the only available recording of extracts from ‘The Young Guard’.

Released during the 100th anniversary year of Shostakovich’s birth, this generously compiled programme contains some rarely heard yet wonderfully characteristic repertoire, including the pungent and dramatic Suite from Hamlet and the Suite from Five Days and Five Nights. Many of the film scores featured here take the feelings of struggle and attack felt by the people of the Soviet Union as their theme. One of these scores is for The Young Guard, based on Alexander Fadeyev’s 1945 novel, and represents Shostakovich’s only collaboration with the director Gerasimov. This is the only available recording of the haunting, yet beautiful score.

The condemnation that Shostakovich experienced during the 1940s left him dependent on producing populist works and these years proved to be one of his most intensive periods of work for the cinema. The Unforgettable Year 1919 is a Stalinist study, and shows Stalin’s military and political leadership through the Civil War. For the battle scene, Shostakovich strangely decided to write a Rachmaninovian piano concertino, ‘The Assault on Krasnaya Gorka’, which is simply gorgeous, and here superbly performed by Martin Roscoe.

Hamlet was the composer’s penultimate film score and, despite his deteriorating health, is one of the greatest scores Shostakovich composed, in or out of the cinema.

This is the final volume in an outstanding series, in which the BBC Philharmonic has consistently maintained the highest of standards.

Dmitri has a Rachmaninov attack in his soundtrack for The Unforgettable Year; Martin Roscoe swoons with pianistic passion; and the Hamlet Suite show Shostakovich at his wittiest.
The Chandos issue will appeal to film music buffs and Shostakovich completists but it deserves to reach a wider audience given the flair and dynamism of the music-making and the high quotient of tunes. As I observed last time round, Sinaisky is always right inside the idiom, just the man for the job.
One must praise the high standards of the series by Maestro Sinaisky and the BBC Players – and the rich, dark, room-filling sound captured by the Chandos engineers.
…and once again Sinaisky handles it with scrupulous fidelity to every shifting mood.


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