Luogo e data di registrazione		Moscow: - 1979 (Op. 36, Op. 4, 6 Transcriptions for Orchestra nn. 1-5) - 1982 (Op. 1, Op. 3, Op. 7, Op. 26) - 1984 ("Big Lightning", Op. 59) - 1985 (Suite No. 1, Op. 128, Op. 30a, Op. 19) Leningrad: - 1979 (6 Transcriptions for Orchestra n. 6)
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Recording Engineers		Igor Veprintsev (Op. 36, 6 Transcriptions for Orchestra nn. 1-4, Op. 26, Suite No. 1, Op. 19) Pyotr Kondrashin (Op. 4 n.1, 6 Transcriptions for Orchestra n. 5) Severin Pazukhin (Op. 4 n.2, Op. 1, Op. 3, Op. 7, "Big Lightning", Op. 59, Op. 129, Op. 30a)
	Prime Edizioni LP		Melodiya
	Edizione CD		BMG Classics "2 CD Twofer" 74231 59058 2 | 2 CD - 73' 15" - 70' 34" | (c) 1998 | (p) 1980, 1983, 1984, 1987, 1991 | ADD
	Note		Front cover: Yuri Ivanovich Pimenov, "The new Moscow", 1937

A must Shostakovich connoisseurs The works selected for the two CDs run from opus 1 of 1919, a Conservatory exercise by the 13-year-old Shostakovich, to a work written euìight years before his death, opus 128. The concentration is on works from the Twenties and Thirties, discovered and in part reconstructed by Gennady Rozhdestvensky. From the early Eighties they were recorded by Melodiya in the series From manuscripts of various years. They are a minor sensation for musiclovers, a must for Shostakovich connoisseurs. The Tale of the priest and his servant Balda opus 36 was an animated film executed in 1933/35 by Mikhail Tsekhanovsky, for which Shostakovich composed the music. The film stock was destroyed during the war and it was not until 1978 that Rozhdestvensky was able to reconstruct the music from handwritten drafts of the score, compiling a concert suite premiered in 1979. The complete film music was revived as a children's opera in 1980 at the Maly Theatre in Leningrad. In 1986 it was given its first German performance, to a text prepared by me from the original, at the Staatsoper in Berlin. The story follows Alexander Pushkin's novel of the same name. The servant Balda is looking for work, the village priest is looking for a servant. They meet in the bazaar (1:4, Bazaar). They strike a deal. In return for ayear's work, the servant demands the right to punch his master three times on the nose. The year passes. The servant eats enough food for four and does the work of seven, always staying cheerful (1:3, Balda turns the Carousel to the joy of young and old). The priest's daughter falls in love with him (1:5, The priest's daughter's dream). Towards the end of the year the priest gets cunning and sends his servant to the devil (1:2, Devil's procession) to claim the tribute that has been denied, knowing full well that no traveller returns from thence. The servant innocently walks into the trap but succeeds in outwitting the devil and returning to the village with the tribute, whereupon he takes his wages, knocking all sense out of the priest's head. The score contains all the best elements of Shostakovich's early music with its strong emphasis on instrumental colour. The servant comes in with heavy kettledrum tread, heroic trumpets and emotional trombone strains, while the priest squeaks away in the piccolo's highest registers and gives out pathetic clarinet quacks and the priest's daughter dreams to the homespun common chords of a guitar and lulls herself with fashionable saxophone warblings; the devils surround themselves with a spooky rattle of xylophones, flitting in on wild glissandos, and the carousel turns to the sweetly ironic tones of a music-box (flute, clarinet, oboe and bassoon). The Two Krylov Fables opus 4 for mezzosoprano or women's choir and orchestra were written in 1922 while Shostakovich was attending the Conservatory and are classic examples of Russian "Kryloviana", a form to which anton Rubinstein and Vladimir Rebikov had already contributed. According to Rozhdestvensky, however, "no-one delved as deep into Krylovian irony as the 18-year-old Shostakovich". Grasshopper and Ant (1:7): the grasshopper sings all summer through and makes no provision for the morrow. In winter she is racked by unger. She asks Neighbour Ant for food and is turned away. The grasshopper argues that in the summer she entertained the ant with her song. "Then now you can dance", the ant tells her. The mezzo-sopranoìs high register provides the grasshopper's voice, the low register the ant's, in a wonderfully economical use of vocal resources. - The ass declares himself a judge of the nightingale's song (1:8, Ass and Nightingale). The singer shows off her skills in a springlike song full of trills and blossoming melody (Rimsky-Korsakov through and through). All are silent, even the winds are subdued. Then we hear the monotonous notes of the ass, who upbraids the singer and recommends lessons from the cockerel. Shocked, the nightingale flies off for ever: "God preserve us from such judges". At the tender age of 18, Shostakovich foretold his own future. He too was subject to the verdict of asinine judges. Only - he never managed to fly away from them. The premiere was held in Moscow in 1974, a year before Shostakovich's death, under the baton of Rozhdestvensky. Shostakovich was a master of instrumentation. In 1928, he adapted two harpsichord sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti (opus 17) for small wind ensemble and timpani, masterpieces full of wit and charm premiered by Nikolay Malko in Leningrad the same year. - Beethoven's Song of the Flea had been orchestrated by Stravinsky in 1909 at the request of Fyodor Shalyapin and successfully premiered in one Ziloti's concerts in St Petersburg. The parable of the flea tells how a flea is appointed minister by royal edict, brings all his friends and relations to court and makes life a misery for all the people around them, who must suffer their fate willy-nilly. This story was as topical as ever during the Communist era. At the request of Yevgeny Nesterenko, Shostakovich rearranged the work. It was one of his last compositions. - Johann Strauss's 1864 Excursion Train written in honour of the new railway line from Vienna to Grinzing was arranged in 1940 for the Maly Opera Theatre of Leningrad to accompany a dance interlude in a production of Rimsky-Korsako's Romance "I waited for you" is a student work documenting the fifteen-year-old's ability to imitate the style of his teachers, notably Rimsky. The punch-line - "You did not come" - packs more of a punch, however, than the preceding generation would have given it. - The transcription of the foxtrot Tea for Two from the musical No No Nanette by Vincent Youmans was remarkably popular under its name of Tahiti Trot. It was the conductor Nikolay Malko who was the guilding spirit behind this masterstroke: "During one of our concert tours through the Ukraine (1928) Mitya" - affectionate form of Dmitri - "was listening to a record of the Tahiti Trot. I said to him: ' Dear Mitya, if you are really so clever as they say, then go into the next room, write out the number from memory and orchestrate it, and I will perform it. I will give you - one hour.'" Forty-five minutes later, the story goes, Shostakovich gave Malko the finished score. And Malko duly premiered it in Leningrad in 1928. The Scherzo for Orchestra in F sharp minor op. 1 (1919), the Theme and Variations in B major op. 3 (1922) and the Scherzo for Orchestra in E flat major op. 7 (1924) are Shostakovich's earliest orchestral works, unearthed from the archive by Rozhdestvensky. - Written in 1919 in his first few month at the Conservatory, the op. 1 Scherzo is dedicated to Maximilian Steinberg (1883-1946), who taught Shostakovich composition, harmony and instrumentation. (Rozhdestvensky conducted the premiere in Tallinn in 1977.) Shostakovich returned to the first theme of his opus 1 in 1944/45 in the sixth piece of his piano cycle Children's Album op. 69. Opus 3, Theme and Variations, is dedicated to Nikolai Sokolov (1859-1922), his teacher of counterpoint, and ots eleven variations were written the year he died. Both works could have been written by a minor late-nineteenth-century Russian composer. - It was only with the E flat Scherzo op. 7 that Shostakovich threw convention out of the window. It is the immediate precursor of his First Symphony. The solo-status piano gives tone colour and rhythm, the bassoon struts and swaggers in the trio, and the last word is when the parts diverge perilously. The main theme of this Scherzo was re-used by Shostakovich in his music to the film The New Babylon op. 18. (Rozhdestvensky premiered this fascinating work in 1981, together with the opus 26 film nusic, in a Leningrad Philharmonic concert in the orchestra's home city.) The 1930 film Alone by the two famous film directors Georgy Kozintsev and Lev Trauberg was half-way to being a sound film. Although dialogue was still shown as text on the screen, the music was already synchronized with the moving pictures. As usual with Kozintsev and Trauberg, the story was a tragi-comic one: the unsuccessful attempt by a village schoolminstrress to escape her straitened circumstances. The music played a part of its own, commenting on the situations (master-stroke of a bandstand orchestra, barrel-organ nostalgia, wailing of muted trumpets to elegiac episodes). Instruments are almost personified, partecipating in the dialogue, as in number 4 of the Suite from the Film Alone op. 26 compiled by Rozhdestvensky. The Big Lighting was announced in 1932 as a comic opera in progress at the Maly Theatre in Leningrad, but nothing came of it, because Shostakovich could not get on with the libretto. Rozhdestvensky found the manuscript score of the unfinished work in the theatre library in 1980; the libretto itself had disappeared, but probably treated a subject popular at the time, namely the experiences of a Soviet citizen in a fictitious capitalist country. Shostakovich had already set a similar subject in 1930 in his ballet The Golden Age, the journey of a Soviet football team to the West. The surviving fragments of the opera describe the feverish preparations for the Russian guests at a hotel (2:1). The architet prescribes an ambience à la russe, with appropriate commentaryfrom the music. For instance, there are quotations from Reinhold Glière's then famous ballet Red Poppy and the famous folk song "A birch stood in the field". The fast-moving American way of life is illustrated by the vigorous musical progress in no. 4 (2:3), the factory owner serenades his automobile like a romantic hero of old singing the praises of his beloved (2:4), and the American worker emotionally swears American-Soviet friendship (2:5). The opera fragments were premiered in the Great Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic on February 11, 1981. The music to the short comic film The Adventures of Korzinkina op. 59 was written in 1940 (and premiered by Rozhdestvensky in Moscow in 1983). The eponymous heroine is a station ticket clerk. She has the warmest sympathy for the plight of her train travellers and does her best to help them, as in the case of a singer entered for a singing competition who has fallen in love with her. When the poor fellow loses his voice at the critical moment, she fights her way onto the stage and insists against all the rules on a repeat performance, kissing him in full view of the public, whereupon he sings as if divinely possessed. Shostakovich drew on the music of the street (2:9, March) and the restaurant (2:11), refining and redrawing it, adding the fashionable instruments of the day such as the saxophone and the muted trumpet, and blending in "inappropriate" instruments like a tuba. Persecution (2:10) is a parody of silent film music, composed for two pianos; the finale (2:13) is the travesty of an apotheosis in which soloists and choir tenderly intone the heroine's first name: Yanya. The closeness to the word nyanya (nurse) is no coincidence. Shostakovich, who earned a living as a cinema pianist in early life, is in his element here. The Suite No. 1 for Jazz Orchestra was written in 1934 (a second followed four years later). The premiere was on March 24, 1934. It is a curiosity, because the music is dance music, not jazz, embellished with witty episodes and fashionable instruments. The Romance "Spring, Spring" op. 128 of 1967 is the last of Shostakocivh's Pushkin settings (preceded by Four Romances op. 46 and Four Monologues op. 91 from 1936 and 1952). The hopeful strain of the opening is misleading. The piece ends with the prospect of "long dark winter nights" in gloomy falling unison chord patterns. The music of the Golden Mountains Suite op. 30a is taken from the 1931 film of the same name by Sergey Yutkevich. The film is set in pre-Revolutionary times. A farmer's boy goes off to the city to seek work and fortune. A popular song of the day "If I only had golden mountains" gives expression to the lad's dreams, providing a title to the film and a man theme to the score. The fanfares of the introduction (2:18) suggest the departure of an armed punishment squad. The waltz (2:19) gained vast popularity extending far beyond the film and was transcribed for brass bands and jazz groups; it was to be heard on the street and in cafes and restaurants, and was arranged for piano by the composer himself, to be played as a rousing encore at concert appearances. The fugue (2:20) is a brilliant example of special relationships between image and sound: the screen shows column after column of workers marching up. Strikes have been called in Baku and Petrograd, accompanied by summary executions. The mood is captured by the funeral march (2:21). In the finale (no. 6) Shostakovich picked up the closing bars of his Third May Day Symphony (Pervomayskaya). The suite was premiered in Moscow in the autumn of 1931 under the baton of Alexander Melik-Pshayev, at the same time as the cinema premiere. The music to Vladimir Mayakovsky's The Bug (in Russian "klop", also sometimes translated as the flea) was written for Vsevolod Meyerhold's famous 1929 production. The piece and its staging brillianty satirized petty-bourgeois behaviour. The music is satirical to match, with its exaggerated four-square marches, its tendency to lilting waltz time, its descent into polka step, and its singing saw (flexatone) with its invariably loud wailing tone. Rozhdestvensky premiered the Suite to The Bug op. 19 in Moscow in November 1982. Sigrid Neef (Transl.: J & M Berridge)