Shostakovich may have put his all into his two completed operas, but he never pretended that his other stage music was anything but ephemeral. His three full-length ballets are, perhaps, borderline cases. It may be difficult to believe that he could have taken seriously a story of Soviet artistes and collective farmers happily cavorting in the idyllic countryside by the River Kuban, and the disposable music he composed for it encourages such scepticism. But then a lot of things that happened in the Soviet Union, especially in the 1930s, are difficult to believe.
The Limpid Stream proves ephemeral in a way Shostakovich could hardly have foreseen. Could there be anything less likely to attract a damning leading article in Pravda than this farrago of pretty polkas, chaste waltzes, oom-cha cafe music, and low-pressure Tchaikovskian adagios? Yet that is what happened. After an eight-month run for the ballet, the article “Balletic falsity” appeared, as a follow-up to “Muddle instead of Music”, the infamous diatribe on Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk district. The two articles sealed Shostakovich’s status as an ‘Enemy of the People’. There is little in common in the style or content of the two works, however (anyone hoping for X certificate luridness a la Lady Macbeth is going to be severely disappointed). It was just a case of taking the most convenient opportunity to make an example of the country’s most prominent composer, pour encourager les autres.
So what is The Limpid Stream like? Some of its individual numbers are familiar from the later ballet suite compilations, and from earlier scores such as The Bolt and Hypothetically Murdered. But until now we have never had a chance to hear the complete ballet and to correlate the music with a detailed scenario. Nor do we have in the present recording. For what Chandos present is a “revised version by Gennadi Rozhdestvensky”, which, to go by the track listings, omits 15 of the 44 numbers. Some of the omissions are apparently repetitions (my best efforts have failed to come up with a score by which to check this); and at least the abridgement is declared, unlike in Chandos’s supposedly ‘complete’ recording of The Golden Age (5/94). But for a work of such historical interest this still seems to me to represent an extraordinary missed opportunity.
I have tried not to let that frustration colour my reaction to the performance, but the playing does strike me as excessively well-behaved. I can find little or nothing of Rozhdestvensky’s musical personality in it. Recording quality is fine, but I’m afraid one cheer is the most I can raise for this issue.'