For sustained inspiration Shostakovich's first ballet score is no rival to Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet; neither is it as even in quality as Britten's Prince of the Pagodas. But its first ever complete recording is at least as much of an event as the recent rehabilitation of Britten's work; and in terms of topical and sociological interest it is at least as fascinating as Prokofiev's.
The Golden Age is an industrial exhibition organized in a capitalist country, at which a group of Soviet sportsmen have been invited to compete. A local variety dancer tries to seduce the captain of the Soviet football team. He resists, but the organizers of the exhibition see the chance to exploit the relationship for propaganda purposes by staging a dance of international class peace. They circumvent the captain's reluctance by arresting him and substituting the variety dancer's Fascist boyfriend, kitted out in Soviet strip. At the last minute Western working-class sportsmen release the Soviet footballer, the charade is exposed, and there is a final dance of solidarity between the Soviet and Western workers.
That at least was the original concept, as described by its author, the film-maker Aleksandr Ivanovsky, in his memoirs. But there was also a maze of sub-plots and incidental action (most notoriously the famous satirical Polka which accompanies a send-up of a Geneva disarmament conference), and in the course of a year's preparation for the premiere (October 26th, 1930) a number of choreographic cooks combined to spoil the already dubious broth. In fact the widely-accepted stories of the 'failure' of The Golden Age are exaggerated, as recent Russian research has confirmed. Undoubtedly the performers had difficulty with the music (as they would do a few years later with Romeo and Juliet). But the critics, the composer, and so far as we can tell the audiences, were delighted. It was only when the puritanical tastes of the dominant Proletarian musical organizations intervened that the ballet was removed from the stage.
It is well-nigh impossible to follow the story-line from the music itself, although the general idea of Shostakovich's characterization is clearly to differentiate between goodies and baddies by assigning them respectively healthy-folk and decadent-bourgeois idioms. But then the trouble was, he couldn't stop himself enjoying being decadent. Not all of the 37 movements stand up independently of the stage-action. But the finales and the whole of Act 3 are top-notch stuff, at times surprisingly threatening in tone and symphonic in continuity; and there are several movements which could undoubtedly be promoted alongside the four in the familiar concert suite (the Tap Dance of Act 2 is especially appealing, for instance). Those who know their Shostakovich will be constantly intrigued by foretastes of Lady Macbeth, the Fourth Symphony and the Hamlet music, and by the appearance of Shostakovich's ''Tea for Two'' arrangement as an Interlude in Act 2.
This first complete recording is a major coup for Chandos. And it's good news that they are lining up the other two Shostakovich ballets as well. Admittedly not even their flattering engineering can disguise a certain lack of confidence and idiomatic flair on the part of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra. The borderline area between wit and cruelty, which so much of the music inhabits, obviously does not come naturally to them, some of their characterization is lukewarm, and some of the faster movements sound positively lethargic. Even when they do get close to the spirit (in a creditable majority of numbers) it is difficult to suppress memories of the bite and panache Rozhdestvensky used to elicit from his Russian orchestras. But let that not deter anyone with the least interest in Shostakovich, or ballet music, or Soviet music, or indeed Soviet culture as a whole, from investigating this weird and intermittently wonderful score.'