Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District was greeted with great enthusiasm at its numerous performances in his native Russia as well as worldwide. However the opera’s success was shortlived, for in January 1936, after Stalin attended a performance, it was condemned in an editorial in Pravda.The work was subsequently banned and only reappeared, sanitised as Katerina Ismailova in 1962.The Suite from Katerina Ismailova consists of the entr’actes between some of the scenes.

Shostakovich’s ballet The Limpid Stream was also condemned and it was to this score that he turned in his first four ballet suites. The first three took 4, 3 and 3 movements respectively from The Limpid Stream, while in the Fourth Suite the last movement also came from this score. The First Suite also takes a movement from his earlier ballet The Bolt and the Third three movements from the incidental music he wrote for a play after Balzac’s Comédie humaine. Two other movements, the opening movement of the First Suite and the central Waltz from the three-movement Fourth Suite, look to his early Jazz Orchestra Suite No. 1 of 1934 and the much later Song of the Great Rivers of 1954. However, the Fifth Suite is quite different in that it is exclusively made up of music from The Bolt and was made by the composer at the time the ballet was produced.

The Festive Overture dates from 1947 and represents social realism at its extrovert best. It was written for the thirtieth anniversary of the October Revolution but not performed until the thirty-seventh celebration in 1954.