Luogo e data di registrazione		Moscow, 1966
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Recording Engineers		Nicolai Danili, Severin Pasuchin, Igor Dedkevich
	Prime Edizioni LP		Melodiya
	Edizione CD		BMG Classics "2 CD Twofer" 74231 66981 2 | 2 CD - 76' 42" - 67' 03" | (c) 1999 | (p) 1966 | ADD
	Note		Front cover: Natalya Gontcharova, "Fresh-fallen Snow", 1911

From the early works The audacious high spirits, wit, temperament and light-heartedness of youth, grimacing irony and grotesque instrumental combinations; extremes in every direction, resounding joy and stifled suffering - all these characterize the early works of Dmitry Shostakovich (1906-1975). This is the case in the ballets The Golden Age, The Bolt and The Limpid Stream, in the opera The Nose, in the first three symphonies and in various stage and film scores. Intended less as a provocation than as an uncensored expression of feelings, this extroverted style receded after 1936. The ballet The Limpid Stream op. 39 is important in this regard. Composed between 1934 and 1935, it was premiered in Fyodor Lopukhov's choreography at the Maly Theatre in Leningrad on June 4, 1935. Its first performance at the Bolshoy Theatre in Moscow followed shortly afterward, on November 30, 1935. As Shostakovich commented, it is set in a collective farm or kolkhoz in the Kuban region. "The characters are kolkhozniks and artists visitng the kolkhoz. (...) The music contains much lyricism, many comic elements." The ballet ran successfully in Leningrad and Moscow until February. On January 28, 1936, however, the party mouthpiece Pravda overtly condemned the composer's second opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which thereupon immediately disappeared from the theatres. Almost immediately, on February 6, 1936, there followed an editorial article in the same newspaper headed "Alienating Ballet". So The Limpid Stream likewise disappeared from the repertoire. And there was more to come. In volume 26 (published in 1987) of the Societ complete edition of Shostakovich's works there is a five-movement suite of the ballet which is supposed to have been premiered in March 11, 1945. In fact, in the course of 1947 two suites were premiered by Alexander Gauk which had been compiled by Levon Atovmyan from the music of all three ballets, that of The Limpid Stream dominating, from works for film and the stage and from orchestral suites not played at the time (including the Suite no. 1 for jazz orchestra of 1934). 1948 saw the premiere of the third suite of the same type under Abram Stasevich. The composer Atovmyan (1901-1973) was director of the state music-publishing facility of the USSR from 1939 to 1948 and director and artistic director of the symphony orchestra of the state film committee from 1953 to 1963, and was therefore in a position to revive the officially condemned and ignored ballets. It is no accident that ih his Six Songs after English poets op. 62 of 1942, an important work in which he expressed his gratitude, Shostakovich dedicated the first song to Atovmyan. The composer's son Maxim Shostakovich was born in 1938 and studied piano with Yakov Flier and conducting with Rozhdestvensky and Markevich at the Moscow Conservatory. He recorded these three suites for Melodiya in 1966. In the same year he won a prize in the Inner-Soviet Young Conductor's Competition and afterwards took over the direction of the Radio Symphony Orchestra. He was therefore accredited by the cultural bureaucracy until he emigrated at the beginning of the nineteen-eighties. The Ballet Suite no. 1 begins with a Lyrical Waltz which Shostakovich wrote for jazz orchestra. The remaining five numbers come from the ballet The Limpid Stream. Shostakovich used four of these - Waltz Joke, Dance, Romance, Polka - in his Seven Doll's Dances, a collection of seven light piano pieces (1947). The Ballet Sauite no. 2 was heard for the first time on Moscow radio in 1947 under Alexander Gauk's baton. Once again a waltz begins the suite, but this time in scherzo style. The Adagio (no. 2) is dominated by a solo cello. Written for jazz orchestra, the Polka incorporates fragments from the ballet The Golden Age. In the Sentimental Romance (no. 4) the tone is ironically set by the bassoon. The Spring Waltz (no. 5) is from the music for the film Michurin. In 1948 Shostakovich was once again subjected to disciplinary action. Apart from his Fifth and Seventh symphonies, hardly any of his music was now performed in the Soviet Union and he was in financial straits. Like the two earlier ones, the Third Ballet Suite qualified as a stock piece for a popular radio programme. It begins with a waltz of the "festive" kind, taken from the incidental music to The Human Comedy op. 37 (after Balzac). The Gavotte (no.2) is one of those rare examples of stylistic imitation in Shostakovich and originates from the piano cycle Seven Doll's Dances. The Dance (no. 3) is a galop in disguise. The Valse (no. 5) from The Limpid Stream is also found in the Seven Dolls' Dances under the name Lyrical Waltz. The concluding Galop (no. 6) is a virtuoso pièce de résistance (also from The Limpid Stream). The ballet The Bolt op. 27 (designated a "choreographic play") was written in 1930/31. It was premiered at the Kirov Theaetre in Leningrad on April 8, 1931 in the choreography of Fyodor Lopukhov (known for his revue Red Whirlwind of 1924). Reflecting the zeitgeist, it uses the theme of industrial production. Elite workers struggle with bureaucracy, sabotage and the petty bourgeoise. An industrious worker suffers because a drunkard destroys a new machine with a bolt. But the villain is discovered and the diligent worker can continue to work away for the public good. The plot itself was of relatively little importance in such ballets; it merely needed to serve as a pretext for predictable situations allowing the rhythms of work and the machines, the collision of the masses and the individualist, of town and country to be transformed into music and movement. The confrontation of two musical spjeres is deliberately overstated. The elite workers and Komsomol members are depicted by means of political songs for the masses, marches and Russian folk-songs, whereas the petty bourgeois villains are represented by borrowings from western popular dances (secretary Koselkov's Tango in no. 4) and lively instrumental solos (the bassoon solo in no. 2 The Bureaucrat or the xylophone solo in The Opportunist, no. 7). Shostakovich paints the pathos of the machines in rhythmic ostinati and anthemic passages in direct contrast to the whipped-up fury of work characterized by colonial exploitation (no. 6: Dance of the Colonial Slave-girls). Alexander Gauk premiered the Suite op. 27a at the Leningrad Philharmonic Hall on January 17, 1933. The ballet The Golden Age op. 22, written in 1929/30, was premiered in the choreography of Kaplan and Vainonen at the Kirov Theatre in Leningrad as early as 1930. Kiev and Odessa followed. It is set in a large western industrial town to which a Soviet football team has travelled during an industrial exhibition and relates the adventures of the new Soviet person in the spoilt old bourgeois world. Shostakovich saw his "primary commitment in confronting the two cultures", turning to then fashionable dances of both the Western and the Eastern worlds, "not because he wanted to contribute to the development od fance music (...), but in order to dramatize the dances and give the music symphonic and dramatic development". Both plot and music suited Vainonen's penchant for presenting the action of a ballet in loosely anecdotal self-contained numbers. The premiere of the suite took place at the Leningrad Philharmonic Hall on March 19, 1930. Humorous instrumental gestures, a noisy boisterousness, now hectic, now elegant, and racy tempos recreate the atmosphere of the times, while Shostakovich's individual style is unmistakable in the many unexpected instrumental solos (particularly in no. 2 Adagio). In 1982 the choreographer Yuri Grigorovich attempted to revive The Golden Age and The Bolt with new librettos at the Bolshoy Theatre in Moscow. Performances followed in Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Berlin and Warsaw. Shostakovich wrote film music all his life, living from it in difficult times or using it to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the cultural bureaucrats as a composer who toed the party line. This work did in fact bring him into contact with the leading personalities of the great Soviet Russian film industry, and he took part in that fascinating experiment of lighting the torch of enlightenment for a Russian people just walking up from a nightmare lasting several centuries. In 1943/44 he wrote the music for the film Soya by Lev Arnstam (born in 1905). Intended for young people, the film was first performed on September 22, 1944. It depicts the life and death of the Komsomol member Soya Kozmodemyanskaya. Born in the district of Tambov in 1923, she joined a partisan group in October 1941. She was arrested by the German fascist occupying forces the very next month, cruelly tortured and finally hanged. In this film, as in two others, Shostakovich based his work "on the laws of symphonic development, so as to develop the great ideas and feelings the themes embody." (Literaturnaya gazeta 10.4.1939) No. 4 is a quotation from the composer's own work, a prelude from the 24 Preludes for Piano op. 34 of 1932/33. In the finale (no. 35) Shostakovich used themes from the Slavsya Chorus from Mikhail Glinka's opera A Life for the Tsar. In both works the situation is similar - a human being has given his life for his people, and victory over the occupying forces can now be celebrated in Moscow's Red Square. But the jubilation is mingled with lamentation, recalling and paying tribute to the death. The suite ends pianissimo. In 1947 Shostakovich composed for Georgy Kozintsev (1905-1973) the music to the film Pirogov, which was based on a scenario by Yuri German (1910-1967). The post-war period of Soviet Russian film-making was characterized by a series of historical portraits. In addition to the Pirogov portrait, Kozintsev and Shostakovich were allowed to make firther documentaries about the biologist Michurin and the literary critic Belinski. At first glance, Nikolai Pirogov (1810-1881) was the founder of modern military surgery. Indeed, this was Stalin's line. But further scrutiny reveals this man as a true hero. A highly educated and brilliant physician, Pirogov might have made a name for mihself as a medical doctor or scientist at universities anywhere in the world. Yet, confronted with the terrible suffering on the battle fields of Europe (1847 Caucasus, 1854 Crimea, 1870/71 Franco-Prussian War, 1877/78 Russo-Turkish War), he devoted his energies to developing effective amputation techniques that would put an end to the torment of wounded soldiers who were slowly bleeding to death and wrote textbooks in order to disseminate his knowledge, examples being the famous Topographical anatomy of the human body of 1859 and the Basic techniques of general military surgery of 1864. His compassion even extended to the "enemy" in the reports he wrote in 1871 on the military hospitals in Germany, Lorraine and Alsace. Shostakovich was bound in lifelong friendship with Georgy Kozintsev and composed the music fo almost all of his films. Together with Kozintsev, he was able to exploit the officially prescribed subject matter of these productions for his own, higher purpose: preventing the torch of enlightenment from being extinguished in a Russia darkened by Stalin's terror. Sigrid Neef (Transl.: J & M Berridge)