Like The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk a quarter of a century earlier, Shostakovich’s one and only musical was a hit. Other similarities are hard to find. Unlike its bloody predecessor, Cheryomushki did not fall from official grace. In fact such was the breadth of esteem it enjoyed that it was reworked as a feature-film in 1963 – four years after its first staging – and broadcast on Soviet television at intervals for the rest of the composer’s life. It was even, as Andrew Huth’s helpful essay recalls, released in the US, under the title Song over Moscow, albeit it to rather less acclaim than in its homeland.

This anodyne little comedy about rehousing (to Moscow’s “Cherry-trees” suburbs) and petty corruption had enormous resonance for Russians in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. Both the musical and the film were brilliantly engineered pieces of Socialist Realist spin, encouraging good-humoured acceptance of dire social conditions and continued belief in a “bright future”. There is satire here, but only of the most cautious variety: with a smile, but no teeth.

Of its kind the film is admirably put together, and both audio and video scrub up well in its remastering for DVD. A good deal of innocuous fun is had on the part of the singer-actors, many of whom would have been familiar to Soviet audiences. The squally sopranos and boomy baritones may be an acquired taste, but the direction – both musical and visual – has the sharpness of pacing crucial to the genre (far more so than on Rozhdestvensky’s soggy CD account of the full version of the music).

Yet the film version is in no way a substitute for the musical itself. For one thing, probably little more than a third of the music Shostakovich “composed” survives the translation of media (though completists should note that he actually added bits for the film as well). For another thing, the re-jigging of the scenario is extensive (but then so it would most likely have been in stage productions). For a full picture of Shostakovich’s score we really need also a reissue of the sparky Melodiya LP recording conducted by Grigory Stolyarov. Meanwhile this DVD provides us with a fine document of Soviet culture in the late-Thaw years and some modest entertainment value over and above that.