SHOSTAKOVICH: Fall of Berlin (The) / The Unforgettable Year 1919 Suite

Dmitry Shostakovich (DSCH) composed about 35 film-scores. This is quite remarkable, out of a total quantity of 147 numbered works. These were written between 1929 and 1970, which means about one a year. A dozen have been extracted or arranged as concert suites and were already recorded on LPs during the mono and stereo eras of Melodiya, and were occasionally licensed on American and European labels. Suites or fragments of Zoya (1944), Michurin (1948), The Gadfly (1955) and Hamlet (1963) had also become known in international concert repertoire, together with his symphonies, concertos and chamber music. His score for Leonid Trauberg’s silent masterpiece New Babylon (1929) was relaunched in Paris in a performance with a live orchestra in 1975, conducted by Marius Constant, on a date which can be considered a memorable one in the history of silent film music. For a young man of 23, this mordant score was already a significant achievement, but by then he had already written his first three symphonies, a chamber opera (The Nose) and over ten chamber and piano works. He had started as a young and underpaid pianist in a Leningrad silent cinema, which was actually the ideal ambiance to learn how to write for the movies. Silent cinema’s purely improvisatory or last-minute way of scoring/arranging technique was the best training for a musician’s intuition or sense of drama. It is well-known that many of Shostakovich’s film scores were not well received by Russian culture apparatchiks, but to him it was much more difficult to overcome harsh criticism of his more important works. Some forty years of film music composing within 56 turbulent years as a composer of symphonies, string quartets, operas and song cycles which all have become world famous, may have taken second place. Considering his film scores as a whole, it may be seen that his earlier works reflect more pleasure in the experimental than his later ones, and this not only in comparison with the greatly inferior musical level of his fellow composers from contemporary Hollywood. Particularly notable is the fact that Shostakovich had found a way to integrate his straightforward lyricism and sardonic language with film music, whether in scoring such simple pieces as a waltz, a polka, a galop, a song or a short interlude. In other words, his complete personality is omnipresent in his film music as well, making it a valuable inheritance of Russia’s culture, besides the achievements by other composers like Sergey Prokofiev, Aram Khachaturian, Moysey Vainberg and Dimitry Kabalevsky, who also worked for the film industry with excellent results.