Collectors of Russian music on record already owe a massive debt to Olympia, here is another fascinating and generous compilation, taken from four Melodiya LPs which enjoyed only the briefest and most limited circulation in this country. It offers the newcomer some delightful discoveries.
Among composer-prodigies Shostakovich's stock has always been high, thanks to his First Symphony, premiered when he was 19 (and actually finished a year earlier). But that's his Op. 10; what of the previous nine? In fact, like Stravinsky, Shostakovich cut his teeth on scherzos, or crypto-scherzos—understandably, since the structure is so easy to handle and the genre so well-adapted to displays of high spirits and colouristic effect. The Op. 1 Scherzo was the 13-year-old composer's first project as a student of the Petrograd Conservatoire, and its delightful main theme was reworked as ''The Clockwork Doll'' in the Child's Exercise Book, Op. 69. A beautifully devised and far from predictable climax is the strongest feature of the piece; the slightly routine and premature ending is its weakest.
The Op. 3 Variations are perhaps the nearest thing to an academic exercise in the whole of Shostakovich's output; at least the dutiful Regerian early stages suggest that, but once the later variations start to tackle the more congenial languages of Richard Strauss and Stravinsky the creative spark ignites. Undoubtedly the Op. 7 Scherzo is far more of a breakthrough piece, the concertante piano part strongly suggesting close encounters of the Stravinskyan kind; anyone at all susceptible to Shostakovich's unique brand of humour will surely find this an irresistible example.
All these pieces are extremely well played and the clear recordings, transferred at a high level, are a pleasure to listen to. The same goes for the film-score suites. In these, as might be expected, there is a heavy reliance on pastiche and near-vamp, and nothing in them rivals the quality of Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kije. But unlike the later Shostakovich film scores there is hardly a movement which could be called dull either, and from time to time a real gem emerges—like the vaudeville spoofs in Korzinkina (including a send-up of Elgar's Cockaigne?), and some pointed 1930s grotesquerie in Alone. The first movement of La comedie humaine shows Shostakovich dabbling in a curious diluted 'Western' idiom, more suggestive of Paris Texas than Paris France, but the can-can finale finds him once again in his element.
The Spanish Songs are supposedly arrangements of authentic melodies and words (in Russian translations), though as sung by a dark-toned Russian bass most of their Spanishness disappears (they are usually sung by a mezzo-soprano; Artur Eisen has to transpose four of the six songs down a semitone). This is not perhaps the most significant of Shostakovich's song-cycles, but it forms a welcome part of an exceptionally valuable issue.'