This is Volume II in
Chandos’s Shostakovich film music series.
The Golden Mountains
(1931) was the composer’s third score.
It was set in 1914, but inspired by
the 1905 strike in St Petersburg’s Putilov
ironworks which broke out a few days
before the infamous 1905 Bloody Sunday
massacre; the subject of Shostakovich’s
Eleventh Symphony (1957). At a more
personal level, the story involves Piotr,
an impoverished peasant who is set up
by the factory bosses to break the impending
strike before he realises he must support
his fellow workers. The six-movement
suite commences with a heavy fanfare
of trumpets grounded by persistent bass
drum thuds. In antithesis, there follows
a light-hearted waltz with an incongruous-sounding
Hawaiian guitar. The score then develops,
first, into fairy-like ballet music
complete with celesta, then into a more
heavy-handed style, as though the waltz
had ventured into an ironworks with
the dancers donning clogs. Finally the
waltz settles into a more familiar ballroom
setting. The ‘Intermezzo’ is darkly
mysterious, sinister even, with quietly
slithering, swirling strings and sour-sounding
horns suggesting, perhaps, wolves lurking
in a white, moonlit landscape. All hell
is let loose in a cruel, heavy peroration
at the close of this extraordinary movement.
There follows a funeral march that creeps
along threateningly, malevolently, before
it bursts out loudly in black fury and
merges into the crushingly defiant ‘Finale’.
The Gadfly (1955)
is probably Shostakovich’s best known
film score. Here we have an extended
42 minute suite of incidental music
from the film. Set in the nineteenth
century, it is about the illegitimate
son of a cardinal who joins the fight
to unite Italy. He is caught but faces
the firing squad as a willing martyr.
The Gadfly continues the themes
of many earlier films stressing the
corrosive power of the Church, the necessity
of binding disparate States into a strong
whole and the importance to the country
of self-sacrifice. Much of the music
has an Italianate feel but with an unmistakeable
Russian style. The suite is full of
melodic, accessible music. It includes,
as well as the famous Romance (used
in the TV series Reilly, Ace of Spies)
and the noble, patriotic Overture, an
elegant eighteenth-century-style ‘Contradance’,
the exuberant and merry ‘Folk Festival’,
and the Barrel-organ waltz, full of
pavement music nostalgia, plus a perky
Galop. Then there is the tender but
tragic ‘Introduction. Andantino’ with
its haunting saxophone solo, the wonderfully
atmospheric ‘Nocturne’ with its beautifully
plaintive cello solo, and the dramatic,
romantic ‘Scene’ which anticipates,
a little, Jarre’s Zhivago music.
The suite is rounded off with a ‘Finale’
that opens with a crushing march that
is swept aside by the triumphant, noble
march first heard in the ‘Overture’.
The ‘Romance’ itself, played in full,
is somewhat restrained in Sinaisky’s
reading but not ineffective in the context
of this extended suite.
Volochayev Days
(1937) was set in 1918 when the Japanese
launched an attack on Vladivostok. The
film portrays the Japanese as deceitful
and Shostakovich gives them a crude
pentatonic march. The short, three-movement
suite on this recording includes an
Overture, ‘The Japanese Attack’ – fanfares,
snare drum rolls and bugle calls and
brass dialogues predominating. The music
here is rather sardonically comic –
Shostakovich clearly having fun at the
expense of the Japanese invaders. The
second battle scene, ‘Fragment’ is more
conventionally combative with a noble
concluding peroration.
Arresting, exciting
and accessible, this is first class
Shostakovich film music performed with
great style and attack. Another triumph
in Chandos’s ongoing film music series
Ian Lace
BBC Philharmonic/Vassily Sinaisky 