As we discover almost monthly, there is a great deal of 'light' music by Shostakovich—much of it excellent, some indifferent. Alas, indifference gains the upper hand in the first three of the ballet suites hastily reassembled from past material in the fallow years following the Zhdanov persecutions. Eleven of the numbers come from The Limpid Stream, a surprisingly bland and innocuous affair for the Shostakovich of the mid 1930s: only a few naughty notes, Jarvi's irrepressible breeze or lilt with every galop and waltz he can lay his hands on and neatly phrased solos from SNO principals rise above the Minkus-like complacency of it all.
The original Chandos CD stopped there; but this mid-price double finds other substantial fillers to Jarvi's Shostakovich symphonies series, and the balance is redressed: what would seem to be The Limpid Stream's best idea, a strong and simple melody, builds effectively throughout the first movement of the Fourth Suite, and the so-called Fifth Suite turns out to be a much earlier, far more dazzling selection put together by the young iconoclast from his 1931 ballet The Bolt. We are back in the strip cartoon territory of caricatured capitalist versus energetic worker familiar from The Golden Age; and the pile-driving SNO brass and teasing solos serve as a reminder that the complete Golden Age (Chandos, 5/94) perhaps went to the wrong Chandos artists (Rozhdestvensky's clean but repressed Stockholm Philharmonic). The Passacaglia at the heart of the Katerina Izmaylova Suite charts new depths—again, searing when full orchestra drives the tragedy home—and the perfectly occasional Festive Overture at the end of the first disc is superficial merrymaking to set the pulses racing in a way that the first three ballet suites can hardly hope to match. A pity this team never turned to any of the film music. The SNO sound, caught in various Scottish venues, seems more focused than I remember. R1 '9505043'