Soviet films which once made the heart swell (at least for some people) are now more likely to make the gorge rise, and the music that Shostakovich wrote for close on 40 of them is generally little better than kopeck-in-the-slot cliche. Still, it is a side of his output that should always be available, if only for showing that he could out-tub-thump his rivals with one hand tied behind his back.
Capriccio are producing far more serviceable recordings than the Belgian RCA series (no longer available in the UK) which now seems to have dried up after three volumes. The latter included Golden Hills, the story of a peasant experiencing city life in the years leading up to the October Revolution, which has a higher than average quota of intrinsically interesting music, and Mikhail Chiaureli’s Stalin-aggrandizing The Fall of Berlin, in which the musical prototype of the Tenth Symphony Scherzo can clearly be heard. The new Berlin recordings are far better played and in the case of the Golden Hills Suite, more complete. They also give us almost all the published music for the Maxim Trilogy, Kozintsev’s and Trauberg’s mid-1930s story of a young Bolshevik, and the intermittently impressive Zoya, about the heroic wartime deeds of a Russian girl behind the German lines. Maxim is, as far as I know, a premiere recording, although Capriccio do not claim it as such; Zoya does represent something of a missed opportunity, however, with 15 movements now published in addition to Lev Atovmyan’s Suite of five here offered.
If ‘serviceable’ is still as far as I would like to go for this particular issue, that is because there are obvious signs of haste – some insecure brass intonation and string attack, little patches of extraneous noise on the recording, and no texts or translations for the three vocal and choral movements. All the same, Shostakovich completists should be well pleased, and I’ll join them in lobbying Capriccio for as many of these scores as they can lay their hands on.
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