Your Online Shop for Classical Music

Read reviews, listen to the music, and purchase the CD SHOSTAKOVICH: Jazz Suites Nos. 1 - 2 / The Bolt / Tahiti Trot

Narrow your search
with our Music Browser

Classical Music

        Ballet
        Chamber Music
        Choral
        Concertos
        Film Music
        Folk Legends
        Instrumental
        Musicals
        Opera / Operetta
        Orchestral
        Vocal

Recently Released

Upcoming Releases

Special Offers

NaxosDirect Audio

Other Genres:

Audio Books

        Anthologies / Collections
        Classic Fiction, Modern Classics & Contemporary Fiction
        Classical Music Audio Books
        Drama
        Junior Classics and Children's Favourites
        Non-Fiction
        Poetry
        Samplers
        Shakespeare

Blues Legends

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra

BSO on NaxosDirect

DVD

        Ballet DVD
        Classical Concert
        Classical Documentary
        Opera DVD
        Pop/Rock Concert
        Pop/Rock Documentary

Gospel Legends

Jazz

Jazz Contemporary
Jazz Icons

Naxos Label

        Naxos American Classics
        Naxos Best Of...
        Naxos Books
        Naxos Box Sets
        Naxos Cinema Classics
        Naxos Classics
        Naxos DVD
        Naxos DVD-Audio
        Naxos Instrumental
        Naxos International
        Naxos Jazz
        Naxos Limited Edition
        Naxos Milken Archives
        Naxos Night Music
        Naxos Opera
        Naxos Orchestral
        Naxos Samplers
        Naxos Special Release
        Naxos Wind Band Classics
        Naxos World

Nostalgia

Other Genres

SACD

We Recommend….

Essential listening

World

        Ballad
        Bhuddist
        Chinese Music
        Classical (World)
        Early Music (World)
        Folk
        Gamelan
        Gypsy
        Hindustani
        Jazz (World)
        Klezmer
        Vocal (World)
        World

Subscribe to Newsletters

Top 40 Bestselling Naxos CDs

Critics' Choice

Labels
Composer/ Authors
Conductors
Ensembles
Orchestras
Choirs
Artists
Instruments
Producers

SecurityMetrics for PCI Compliance, QSA, IDS, Penetration Testing, Forensics, and Vulnerability Assessment

SHOSTAKOVICH: Jazz Suites Nos. 1 - 2 / The Bolt / Tahiti Trot

Home

Classical Music

Orchestral

SHOSTAKOVICH: Jazz Suites Nos. 1 - 2 / The Bolt / Tahiti Trot

View large image

Total playing time: 01:02:00

£6.99
£4.99 (CD)

In Stock - Usually ships within 48 hours.

Link to this CD Link to this page

Dmitry Shostakovich (1906-1975)

The Bolt (Ballet Suite) • Jazz Suites Nos. 1 and 2 • Tahiti Trot

Although the symphonies, string quartets and concertos represent the core of his achievement, Shostakovich had wide sympathies across the musical spectrum: hence his oft-repeated comment that he enjoyed all music from Bach to Offenbach. Moreover, the revival in recent years of such works as his 1958 musical Moscow-Cheryomushki attests to a composer who entered into the spirit of ‘light music’ with enjoyment and enthusiasm. All of the works on this disc will come as a surprise to those who know Shostakovich only as a concert composer in the Beethovenian tradition.

Shostakovich’s three ballet scores belong to his early radical years, roughly 1926 to 1934, when he was working in a variety of media while, perhaps not altogether consciously, avoiding the symphonic domain he was later to make his own. After the short-lived success of his first ballet The Golden Age (1930), he completed its follow-up, The Bolt, less than six months later. Produced at Leningrad’s Kirov Theatre on 8th April 1931, Fyodor Lopukhov’s scenario of industrial espionage was the pretext for music drawing on circus-like farce and the constructivism made notorious by Stravinsky and Prokofiev’s work for the Ballets Russes in Paris. Despite, or perhaps because of, its topical quality, the USSR being in the midst of Stalin’s first Five Year Plan, The Bolt closed after only a handful of performances, and was never revived as such in the composer’s lifetime.

Shostakovich duly prepared a suite of eight movements from the ballet, given its first performance by Alexander Gauk and the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra on 17th January 1933. Shostakovich discarded two movements prior to publication a year later (in this form, the piece became known as Ballet Suite No. 5, following on from the four suites prepared by Levon Antovmyan from the composer’s stage music in the early 1950s), but the present recording resorts to the original order.

Following the Introduction, a thunderous overture with more than an affectionate side-swipe at Tchaikovsky’s ballet music, the polka of The Bureaucrat gives the bassoon a starring rôle in its high jinks. The Drayman’s Dance is a brief sequence of variations on a full-blooded theme, very much in the style of folk-ballets such as Gliere’s The Red Poppy. Kozelkov’s Dance with Friends looks rather to the popular dances of the decadent Western bourgeoisie, notably the tango, for its representation of the villains of the ballet. Intermezzo is a strutting rhythmic piece, with a more rhapsodic central section, of the type familiar from Shostakovich’s theatre and film scores. Dance of the Colonial Slave-Girl is another folk-inspired number, alternatively moody and frenetic, while The Conciliator has a circus-like gaiety, thanks to a scintillating display from solo xylophone. The General Dance of Enthusiasm and Apotheosis ends the suite, and the ballet, in a mood of uproarious panache. Shostakovich wrote numerous such finales during this period, but none matches this for sheer élan. Perhaps its over-the-top quality was just too much for the Soviet authorities to take.

Despite his immersion in popular theatre and vaudeville during the late 1920s and early 1930s, Shostakovich did not attempt a specifically jazz-orientated work until 1934, when he entered a competition in Leningrad whose aim was to elevate jazz from café music to a more serious status. The three-movement Jazz Suite No. 1 achieves this with deft precision. After the languorous Waltz, with its indelible trumpet melody, the Polka presents a brittle but humorous façade. The mock- pathos of the Foxtrot closes the suite, with enough ambivalence in its bluesy harmonies to indicate that Shostakovich was capable of investing the jazz idiom with altogether more serious emotions.

A Second Jazz Suite, written for Victor Knusnevitsky and his State Orchestra for Jazz, followed in 1938, but the score was lost during World War Two. It was not heard again until 2000, when the emergence of a piano score enabled the composer and musicologist Gerard McBurney to prepare three movements for performance at the Last Night of the Proms in London (the material for further movements has since come to light). What became known as Jazz Suite No. 2 is actually a suite for theatre or ‘promenade’ orchestra, with saxophones and accordion prominent, drawn from various ballet, film and theatre scores.

The opening March brings a sturdy Russian-ness to its Lehár-like brio, which the Lyric Waltz contrasts with its insinuating saxophone theme, given soulful treatment by the whole orchestra. The effervescent First Dance has become better known as Public Holiday from Shostakovich’s 1955 score for the film The Gadfly. The First Waltz is an affectionate nod towards Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, then the Little Polka entertains with its catchy xylophone-led tune. The Second Waltz, featuring another sinuous saxophone melody, recently found popularity as the title music for Stanley Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut. The hornpipe-like gait of the Second Dance has an engaging folksy quality, then the Finale brings the suite to a spirited and good-humoured conclusion.

Shostakovich’s involvement in popular music came about quite fortuitously, as the result of a bet with the conductor Nikolay Malko, who had given the first performance of the First Symphony in 1926, to orchestrate Vincent Youmans’ famous number Tea for Two from his musical No No Nanette. Challenged to complete his orchestration within an hour, Shostakovich needed only forty minutes. The result, alternately witty and nostalgic, was first heard in Moscow on 25th November 1928, when Malko performed it under the title Tahiti Trot. The piece was soon played by dance bands and theatre orchestras everywhere, and Shostakovich astutely included it in his ballet The Golden Age, where it became a regularly encored item. Like so much of his music from this period, it disappeared as the Stalinisation of the Soviet Union proceeded apace, only to be revived in the years immediately following the composer’s death in 1975.

Richard Whitehouse

Disc 1

The Bolt (Ballet Suite)

(more info)

Performed by: Russian State Symphony Orchestra
Composed by: Dmitry Shostakovich
Conducted by: Dmitry Yablonsky
Recording date: Sep-2001
Produced by: Doronina, Lubov

Overture (Introduction) - 05:06
The Bureaucrat (Polka) - 02:42
The Drayman's Dance (Variations) - 01:54
Koelkov's Dance with Friends (Tango) - 05:21
Intermezzo - 03:42
The Dance of the Colonial Slave-Girl - 03:42
The Conciliator - 03:09
General Dance of Enthusiasm and Apotheosis (Finale) - 03:26

Jazz Suite No. 2 (Suite for Stage Variety Orchestra)

(more info)

Performed by: Russian State Symphony Orchestra
Composed by: Dmitry Shostakovich
Conducted by: Dmitry Yablonsky
Recording date: Sep-2001
Produced by: Doronina, Lubov

March - 03:08
Lyric Waltz - 02:08
Dance 1 - 03:04
Waltz 1 - 02:48
Little Polka - 01:50
Waltz 2 - 03:13
Dance 2 - 02:15
Finale - 01:54

Jazz Suite No. 1

(more info)

Performed by: Russian State Symphony Orchestra
Composed by: Dmitry Shostakovich
Conducted by: Dmitry Yablonsky
Recording date: Sep-2001
Produced by: Doronina, Lubov

Waltz - 02:28
Polka - 01:36
Foxtrot (Blues) - 04:14

Tahiti Trot, Op. 16

(more info)

Performed by: Russian State Symphony Orchestra
Composed by: Dmitry Shostakovich
Conducted by: Dmitry Yablonsky
Recording date: Sep-2001
Produced by: Doronina, Lubov

Tahiti Trot (Tea for Two), Op. 16 - 04:09

Reviews

Be the first to review this title

Sign up for our newsletter!

FREE POSTAGE AND PACKING ON ALL ITEMS

We distribute exclusively within the UK only

Subscribe to our newsletter and unlock Naxos Rewards by creating an account. Create your account here.

See all of our great site features here.

Composer(s)/ Author(s):
Shostakovich, Dmitry

Conductor(s):
Yablonsky, Dmitry

Orchestra(s):
Russian State Symphony Orchestra

Label: Naxos Classics
UPC: 747313594924
Item Number: 8555949
Release Date: Apr 1, 2002