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Dmitry SHOSTAKOVICH (1906-1975)
The Bedbug Op.19 - Incidental music to the comedy by Vladimir Mayakovsky (1929) [28:39]
Love & Hate Op.35 - complete film score reconstructed by Mark Fitz-Gerald (1935) [30:10]
Mannheim Opera Choir
Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz/Mark Fitz-Gerald
rec. 2019, Philharmonie Ludwigshafen, Germany
NAXOS 8.574100 [58:54]

This is the fifth volume of music from Naxos dedicated to the restoration of complete film or theatre scores by Shostakovich. The responsibility for the restoration and musical direction of these diverse and often fascinating sequences of music has fallen to the British conductor Mark Fitz-Gerald. The importance of the role of film and theatre music in Shostakovich's artistic life and indeed survival is not in doubt so, while substantial tracts of these scores can sound 'light' and often inconsequential, they are a vital part of understanding his life and work as a whole.

Many of these film scores survived in abbreviated suites often re-ordered and re-orchestrated by Lev Atovmyan although that is not the case of Love and Hate, so for most listeners this will be completely 'new' Shostakovich. For Fitz-Gerald a major part of the process has been the restoration of these extended scores from a variety of sources including brief piano sketches and the soundtracks to the original films. That is a laborious and time-consuming job so huge credit has to go to everyone involved in such a quasi archaeological process. The question remains, once the restoration is complete just how valuable is the music and how good the performance. I enjoyed Fitz-Gerald's first foray on Naxos very much - the two disc set of New Babylon from 2011 made it into my Record of the Year selection. I would still argue that that work is a crucial score in the development of Shostakovich as Artist and Composer and the performance is scintillating. As Shostakovich's work within the film industry became more musically 'routine' so the value of the scores as signposts to his wider musical world diminishes. For sure the Shostakovich completist will want to hear every note but the significance for the more general listener is reduced. Also, there is a nagging feeling that Fitz-Gerald and his skilled Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz orchestra are just a little bit detached and polite for these raucous often kaleidoscopic scores.

This is certainly true for the half-hour of incidental music for the stage play The Bedbug. The score is exactly contemporaneous with New Babylon and makes similar use of a dizzyingly wide range of musical styles and conventions all viewed through the [then] confident perspective of a youthful composer. It was a stellar creative team alongside Shostakovich; written by Vladimir Mayakovsky - who committed suicide within a year, directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold, and designed by Alexander Rodchenko. This work epitomised the idealistic Avant-gardism allowed by the Soviet Union in its early years. Parody and satire was still positively encouraged so no surprise to hear in this score a sequence of pompously empty marches, woozy waltzes and manic vaudevillian dances. The excellent - minutely printed - liner details the endless changes and amendments required of the composer to fulfil Meyerhold's vision so by ear alone the result is a montage of gleefully anarchic music but lacking the variety and emotional power of New Babylon. And if there is going to be this style of music it requires a gaudy technicolour performance to underline the greasepaint-grotesqueries here embodied. Which is where this too polite version falls down. The only comparative version I know is a four movement suite played by the USSR Ministry of Culture Orchestra under Gennady Rohzdestvensky. This was used as a filler on a couple of different Olympia CD's and was typical of Melodiya-sourced recordings with a close recording highlighting the bite and edge of the Soviet ensemble's playing. Rohzdestvensky's queasy saxophone and accompanying brass in the Intermezzo is infinitely more characterful than Fitz-Gerald's elegantly played rendition. The Rohzdestvensky suite runs to just some ten minutes of music as compared to the complete score of nearly thirty. But it is hard not to feel that the subversive spirit of the entire production is more accurately encapsulated in that ten.

The second work presented here is probably the more interesting for the Shostakovich aficionado simply because it presents half an hour of completely unfamiliar music. Although written just half a dozen years after The Bedbug the musical language employed - although still diverse and montage-like in its contrasting use of musical styles and genres - points towards the terser middle period of Shostakovich's composing career. By opus number it sits pretty much halfway between Lady Macbeth and the yet-to-be-written/withdrawn Symphony No.4. According to a note in the liner by Mark Fitz-Gerald, this is a rare case of the composer's original manuscript score not having survived - probably lost during the siege of Leningrad. The complete score has twenty three sections. Of that, just eight survived in piano sketch form. Of the rest, a combination of transcription from the original - low quality - soundtrack, musicological conjecture, best-guess reconstruction and expansion from bare bones sketches reflects the skill and devotion of the team involved. Most of the cues are brief with only one, No.18 The Funeral, lasting longer than three minutes. But as such I must admit I found myself admiring the skill that all great film composers must have, of being able to distil a specific dramatic mood into music in minimal time often using minimal musical resources. Again the liner is very good at providing the listener with a detailed guide to each cue and how it fitted to the images on the screen. I liked the sombre opening Introduction but again had a niggling feeling that another version would dig deeper into the unmistakably Russian lugubriousness in the writing. The song How long will my heart ache and moan is an effective lament sung by a woman/women for their men who have be sent to the front. The uncredited singer here has a suitably slavonic timbre and she is well supported by members of the Mannheim Opera choir whether the men in the Soldier's March or the women in an affecting a capella reprise of the How long will my heart ache song. The Morning March and Drunken Soldier cues are closer to the parodic music of the Bedbug and again there is a strong sense that Fitz-Gerald needs to draw harsher colours and timbres from his well-behaved German players. That said the atmospheric cues such as A Soldier's murder and the aforementioned The Funeral not only contain the most substantial music in purely abstract terms but are powerful and impressive.

Any such score and sequence of cues is written at the service of the film and its director so by definition some of these cues will be more successful when heard in isolation than others. Certainly as someone who enjoys film scores in general and Shostakovich's music in particular I am very pleased to have been able to hear this work. By no means is this one of Shostakovich's most significant works in this genre let alone any other but as another part of the jigsaw puzzle of his creative life this is valuable. Credit to Mark Fitz-Gerald and the team of musical restorers as well as Naxos for producing this well-documented, lovingly detailed disc. The Naxos engineering is very good too with all the disparate musical elements from full orchestra to solo voices, organ and choir well integrated into a believable and effective soundstage. Perhaps there is a case for passing the baton onto someone with a greater flair for the implicit character and drama in much of this music. All in all a welcome release, but one for the enthusiast rather than the general collector.

Nick Barnard