Cheremushki, or Cheryomushki as the Grove convention has it (it’s misprinted in the 1980 edition but corrected in the 1986 Russian Masters 2 revision) and as it should be to conform with other transliterations in Chandos’s cast-list, Chi-ryaw-moosh-kee as it’s pronounced, meaning “Cherry Trees”, is a new high-rise housing estate in late-1950s Moscow. Hopeful arrivals, mainly refugees from the city’s housing shortage, are obstructed by but eventually triumph over the wily ways of the corrupt bureaucrat Fyodor Drebednyov, his grasping fourth wife Vava, and his officious estate manager Afanasi Barabashkin.
The full plot of Shostakovich’s only completed operetta (he planned several others and began sketching at least one of them) is almost as convoluted as my opening sentences. Fortunately Gerard McBurney’s synopsis is a model of concision and clarity, as is his essay on the background to the piece and its many musical allusions. In fact Chandos’s 264-page booklet, including the libretto in cyrillic, is a model of its kind.
It needs to be, because to be honest the music itself is lukewarm stuff. It’s true that Shostakovich alludes to various of his satirical scores (I would add the finale of the Second Piano Concerto to McBurney’s list), and there are certainly half-a-dozen catchy numbers, including the title-song. The text has its mildly funny moments too, with plenty of in-jokes about Soviet life, on the lines of ‘There’s a medicine for colitis, but a person is defenceless against his relatives’. But the musical satire has lost most of the edge of Shostakovich’s early ballet, opera, theatre and film scores, and the good tunes are stretched thin across the nearly two-and-a-half hour duration.
Variety of pace and musical character is a problem. Moscow, Cheryomushki is an endless succession of easygoing waltzes and polkas, and it must hold the world record for the preponderance of allegretto in one work, relieved only by the occasional andantino. (Curiously it reminds me of nothing so much as Charlie Chaplin’s own film scores.)
Rozhdestvensky ought to be a good choice of conductor. Sad to relate, he all but wrecks the music with his sleepy tempos and laborious phrasing. If he wanted any lilt or lift in the rhythm, the Residentie Orchestra don’t supply it. Has he heard the Soviet recording (never issued in the UK) by the original conductor and instigator of the work, Grigory Stolyarov, I wonder? If so, why on earth did he not want to emulate Stolyarov’s much faster tempos, subtler colouring and lightness of touch?
Yelena Prokina is bright-toned and mellifluous as the bluestocking Lidochka, and Alexander Kisselev’s rich bass is fine for Barabashkin. Otherwise the cast is no match for Stolyarov’s idiomatic crooners. If you’re new to the work you’ll probably be kept too busy following the text to notice (the dialogue is slightly cut here and Rozhdestvensky takes the three or four optional musical cuts allowed in the score). But any sense of theatre is conspicuous by its absence from this performance.
In sum, there is little of the panache which made McBurney’s own version of the work for Pimlico Opera in 1994 – rescored for small theatre orchestra, heavily cut and supplied with a racy David Pountney translation – such good entertainment. Moscow, Cheryomushki is a much less tedious score than Rozhdestvensky makes it sound; no masterpiece, to be sure, but as much fun as a Soviet composer could safely deliver in one of the more relaxed interludes of the Khrushchev Thaw. Anyone seriously interested in Shostakovich will have to have it of course; even lucky owners of the vastly superior Stolyarov account should be tempted by Chandos’s first-rate documentation and, it almost goes without saying, recording quality.'