Shchedrin's ballet has been one of his most successful scores, well liked in the Soviet Union by both public and, after some hesitation, by the officials who still had a tight grip on music in the uncertain years after the death of Stalin. He was, as Boris Schwarz put it in his monumental Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia (London; 1972), a safe figure, ''a 'reliable' composer of realistic tend ncies despite occasional modernistic experiments''. The latter included a fascinating passage in his Second Symphony (which could do with reissue in the West), when he writes one of the work's sequence of short movements as a fantasy on the sounds of an orchestra tuning up. But this is fairly harmless, and Shchedrin has remained well placed in Soviet musical life for his ability to extend the language of Shostakovich and, especially in this ballet, Prokofiev to accommodate some novel ideas and techniques without losing hold on a secure diatonic tunefulness. This can come to seem somewhat manufactured (his opera Dead Souls seemed to me rather a laboured work when I saw it in Leningrad some years ago); but good craft enables him to write some eminently danceable, agreeable music for the old Russian fairy-tale of the little horse and its simple owner.
At his best, Shchedrin can produce a fine, soaring lyrical melody, as with the so-called 'Small' Adagio in the ballet's Second Act, or in the Prelude to the Chamber Suite. He scores well, and most of the livelier movements fall easily and attractively on the ear. But really the work, which was first given (unsuccessfully) at the Bolshoi in 1956, is almost half a century late with its modernism. It is witness to the difficulties of young Soviet composers in those trying times. There is an honourable attempt to extend the line of Russian ballet music that flowed from Tchaikovsky by way of Stravinsky and Prokofiev; but rather than a naturally flowing river, the tradition is by now too carefully canalled. The performances are fresh and elegant, the recording nicely balanced.'