The Shostakovich film scores can seem interchangeable with their generic waltz numbers and fanfares but Hamlet is made of sterner stuff. This was the composer’s second bite at the cherry, he had previously contributed to a 1932 stage production, and his music for Grigori Kozintsev’s black-and-white movie, first shown in 1964, is close in spirit and often in content to the major works on which he was working at the time. If you know the Ninth String Quartet, Stepan [Stenka] Razin or the Thirteenth Symphony, you’ll find many of the same textures and sometimes even the same music here. Having joined the Comm-unist Party, however reluctantly, Shostakovich seems to have been going through a ‘civic’ phase in which he combined a ferociously direct, impeccably socialist realist idiom with texts and subject matter that addressed contemporary ills with more than his usual frankness.

Riccardo Chailly included excerpts from the Hamlet suite assembled by Lev Atovmyan in one of his offbeat Shostakovich collections (Decca, 4/99 – nla) and José Serebrier’s Shostakovich film music series embraced that suite in its entirety (RCA, 10/88 – nla). Only Dmitry Yablonsky puts the familiar numbers into the context of the complete score, which inevitably means that we get some cues of rudimentary musical interest, along with surprises like track 14’s delicate pastiche classicism. While the band is, or was, a scratch orchestra, it’s a good one, offering a modern take on the raw primary colours of traditional Soviet music-making. Authentic or not, a harpsichord is deployed for track 20’s ‘Ophelia’ music where Serebrier had a celesta. His Belgian Radio selection is currently available at bargain price recoupled with André Previn’s classic LSO LP version of the Fifth (RCA), but, for ardent film buffs and Shostakovich completists alike, the Naxos disc will be de rigueur: the sound is bolder, the booklet notes fuller and there is twice as much Hamlet.