★★
I was almost put off listening to this album by a cover note announcing that “Shostakovich was known for his fun-loving attitude during his early years as a composer”. A fun guy, right? In his first decade as a composer he was too busy to have much fun and any time later he was oppressed. Any humour he showed was of the gallows variety.
What we have here is a clutch of film and theatre music, some of it reconstructed by the conductor Mark Fitz-Gerald. None is top-drawer Shostakovich. Interludes to Bezymensky’s 1929 comedy The Shot veer between reckless experimentation and deadline hack-work, at times embarrassingly so. Incidental music to Balzac’s Human Comedy, dating from 1933-34, is marginally more sophisticated though lacking the composer’s mature thumbprint.
Three discarded options for The Nose opera have authentic vigour while a 1938 film score about the Karelian city of Vyborg is polished and competent, unmistakably filmic. The Malmo Opera chorus and orchestra perform well for Fitz-Gerald, but the accumulation of trivialities becomes wearing. I am as curious as anyone to know what Shostakovich was doing when he was not engaged in major works, but this collection is unenlightening in all but one respect: fun it was not.
