About this Piece

That Dmitri Shostakovich had a natural flair for comedy may come as a surprise to those who know him only from his austere, tragic, and haunted later symphonies. Especially in his early years, Shostakovich enjoyed a reputation as a wit and prankster. While a student at St. Petersburg Conservatory in the 1920s, he earned badly needed money by playing piano accompaniment for silent movies at a local cinema—many of them American comedies. But management let Dima go when he repeatedly stopped playing to look and laugh.

This early cinema experience served Shostakovich well. Between 1929 and 1970, he wrote scores for almost 40 films in a variety of genres, from the eccentric silent feature The New Babylon to hard-core Stalinist propaganda docudramas like The Fall of Berlin to probing versions of Hamlet and King Lear.

Many of these scores were compiled into suites or recycled in other compositions. Shostakovich’s longtime friend and colleague Levon Atovmyan, a composer and arranger of Armenian origin born in Soviet Turkmenistan, undertook much of that work. One of Atovmyan’s most popular arrangements is the eight-part Suite for Variety Orchestra No. 1, which combines excerpts from Shostakovich’s scores for four different films (three of them comedies) released between 1937 and 1956. The “variety” in the orchestration comes from the inclusion of instruments associated with a dance band—four saxophones, guitar, and accordion—creating a casual, circus-like atmosphere. Atovmyan’s arrangements take considerable liberties with Shostakovich’s original versions, enlarging their length and orchestrations.

For many years, the Suite for Variety Orchestra No. 1 was misidentified as the Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 2. Completed in 1938, the manuscript for the latter, a charming three-movement work, was rediscovered only in 1999.

Three of the numbers heard in this performance (March, Waltz 1, Finale) come from the music for a short madcap film, The Adventures of Korzinkina, released in November 1940. Korzinkina, a well-meaning railroad station ticket clerk, takes pity on a hapless singer (played by a well-known circus clown) who dreams of appearing at the local theater. He succeeds only after considerable backstage shenanigans and slapstick pratfalls.

Only the opening March appeared in the finished film. On screen, this vivacious and irresistible theme-and-variations accompanies the actors’ floundering attempts to escape from a malfunctioning turntable revolving at increasingly hilarious speed. Neither the charming Waltz 1, with its crooning saxophone duet and folksy accordion flavor, nor the rousing Finale, similar in style to the opening March, made the final cut.

Shostakovich scored numerous films directed by the famous team of Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, including the Maxim trilogy, a story of political intrigue set around the time of the Russian Revolution. The Lyric Waltz—written for The Return of Maxim but not included in the final cut—establishes an atmosphere of casual elegance, with prominently featured solos by the four saxophones, two pianos, and accordion.

The most frequently performed and recorded of Shostakovich’s film scores was written for The Gadfly (1955), a tale about Italian revolutionaries set in the 1830s and 1840s. In Dance I (originally called “National Holiday” or “Folk Feast”), Shostakovich invokes Italian folk color with brilliant 16-note runs, tambourine flourishes, syncopated rhythms, and brass fanfares, perhaps paying tribute to Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italien.

—Harlow Robinson