Shostakovich: Jazz Suites (1)

An audiophile-grade LP transfer of a 2006 hit from the Brilliant Classics catalogue: stylish and exuberant accounts of some of Shostakovich’s most popular orchestral music.
Shostakovich’s fluency in light music, and the sharp profile of his personality in an unexpected context, can still come as a shock. Yet he always sounded like himself, no less than Prokofiev or Stravinsky did, whether writing for string quartet or jazz band. And even in these suites of sly foxtrots and waltzes, a double-edged quality emerges, at once smoochy and sinister, depending as much on the mood of the listener as the intrinsic nature of the music.
From 1934, the First Jazz Suite vividly brings a smoky Soviet jazz club to the mind’s eye, with its wailing solo trumpet and parody mandolin. At the same time, the distilled invention of the three brief movements sheds light on Shostakovich’s early experience as a pianist accompanying silent films – capturing a scene or at atmosphere in sound almost at will. The Second Jazz Suite – also confusingly known as the First Suite for Variety Orchestra – is a later concoction by Gerard McBurney after the score of the original, composed in 1938, was lost during the war.
While the Festive Overture is well known as a riotous concert-opener, its later companion is still a rarity, at least in concert. Shostakovich wrote the Overture on Russian and Kirghiz Folk Songs in 1963, in honour of the centenary of Kirghizia’s voluntary incorporation into the Russian State. As an occasional work, solemn and ceremonial, it has been overlooked alongside the Twelfth Symphony from two years earlier, but this Ukrainian recording colours it with an authentically sharp edge and steel gleam.
Reviewing the Jazz Suites on their original release, Classics Today remarked that ‘The National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine achieves an authentic sound – lithe rather than lush – for this music and plays with excellent ensemble… Conductor Theodore Kuchar deserves credit for making the suite consistently entertaining… The listener at least gets to hear these chips from the master’s workbench in friendly performances.’