Seen it, heard it, and translated the Tech Spec list of the show for the Tour    I was raving about the show back at TOP - it's a huge success.  Ratmansky staged it as an OTT soviet spoof of itself, on a colossal set made-up of pseudo-soviet wheatsheaves





Beneath all the various Socialist Realism stuff, the story is about a troupe of ballet dancers deployed as "shock workers" to assist with the harvest in the Kuban, the "breadbasket" of Russia...  tensions rise with the locals, the Collective Farm's Agronomist turns-out to be the brilliant Bolshoi ballerina who threw-over her career for the man she loved...  and guess what, the only way to solve the situation is for them all... to put on the show right here on the farm!   

It's a mad kind of mixture of "The Red Army Cossacks Meet Hellzapoppin'!"    Scooped the awards and made Ratmansky's name - after three years banging his head against the wall trying to run the Bolshoi Theatre as well as stage shows, he's leaving at the end of the season to go to NYC Ballet.  Good news for them, bad news for the Can't-Fix-It-Bolshoi.

BOLT (another of Ratmansky's Bolshoi hit productions) is a completely different kind of show - it's not (intended) to be funny as Svetlie Ruchei was...   the story is about a saboteur who is wrecking soviet factory production deliberately so that they won't meet their Five-Year Plan.   There's a chunk of the overture (but no dancing) here on YouTube:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=eJZ6dzqlUvY

Thanks for the photos of The Limpid Stream production, Reiner. I've managed to find a recording of The Bolt (Gennady R conducting again) for a knockdown £9.99 for 2 discs on Chandos!! 


I've often thought that way about Melodiya releases...I've got a few Svetlanov discs which distort badly in places (exciting performances, of course).
Re DSCH 4, I've booked to see Yakov Kreizberg, whose RNO recording of DSCH 5 & 9 impressed me last year, conducting a performance with the LPO at the RFH. I don't think I've been to a live performance of it before; saw the Gergiev televised from the Proms a couple of years ago.

To avoid an unwanted clash with his Party masters?  Or perhaps because the libretto is miserable socialist-realist crud?

With his beloved LADY pulled, and even BRIGHT BROOK (aka LIMPID STREAM) banned, he must surely have seen the writing on the wall

An early 'heads-up' for what appears to be a new documentary on Shostakovich on SkyArts: http://www.skyarts.co.uk/SkyArts/Music/Article.aspx?artid=5066 screening from Thursday 13th March.

Directors
Peter Robertson
Lewis Owens

Contributors
Maxim Shostakovich
Yevgeny Yevtusheno
Valery Gergiev
Vladimir Fedoseyev,
Boris Tischenko
Colin Stone
Rustem Hayroudinoff
Mark Fitz-Gerald

With an introduction by his son Maxim, this illuminating new documentary provides a unique vision of the private Shostakovich. Shot largely in St Petersburg and Moscow it features extracts from the composer’s personal and unpublished diaries and contains interviews with the composer’s family, his students, friends, collaborators and some of the leading interpreters of his music including Valery Gergiev, Boris Tischenko, Vladimir Fedoseyev, and the writer Yevgeni Yevtushenko.

As well as Shostakovich’s well known 4th, 10th and 13th Symphonies, the film also features previously banned works never before performed in the West including his Fourth Symphony arranged for two pianos, his ‘Unfinished’ String Quartet and the early work Aphorisms, discussed and illustrated by Vladimir Ashkenazy. The film also contains footage of Shostakovich’s final apartment in Moscow.

Throughout his career under the Soviet regime Dmitri Shostakovich was, in many ways, seen as State property by the authorities. Consequently, the Shostakovich that we know and that has been documented up until now has been largely the result of his turbulent relationship with Stalin and the necessary public persona he was forced to adopt and musical tight-rope he had to walk. Yet this is only half the story. This revealing documentary contains material and footage that show instead a side to the man and his music that has never seen or heard before. The Unknown Shostakovich contains interviews about the private side of Shostakovich with his students, his friends, the musicians he worked with, and leading interpreters of his music today, highlighting personal and illuminating anecdotes and reminiscences.

As a result of this oppression, much of Shostakovich’s music was banned or withdrawn by him for various reasons. The Unknown Shostakovich therefore also features private and public performances of his music that has never previously been performed outside of Russia until now: his Fourth Symphony, arranged by the composer for two pianos, performed by award winning pianists Rustem Hayroudinoff and Colin Stone; the early work Aphorisms, illustrated and discussed by the distinguished pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy exclusively for this film; and uniquely his ‘Unfinished’ String Quartet, performed for the first time in the West by the acclaimed Danel Quartet.

Should be worth watching.

I'm working on it, Robert, though there's quite a deal more going on right now chez Dough, (which doesn't mean I'm not thinking about it whilst engaged on other projects). We've recently had a little spate of Shostakovich posting at tOP

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbradio3/F6643901?thread=5122229

with particular reference to Jansons's set, and you may find that there are others who are as disappointed by his cycle as I have been, with a particularly revealing comment from Alison regarding her reaction to his ability to service the surface of the music without ever connecting with what lies beneath. Despite the fact that I have been collecting complete cycles, I'd suggest that he way forward may be to use the Kondrashin as the home base and collect individual readings from there: his Melodiya set interpretation of 4, made soon after the premiere, for example, could usefully be strengthened by his two live recordings: the later one, with the Concertgebouw, offering revised thoughts with the hindsight of experience.

Going for Jansons over what exists of the Mravinsky recordings would be a false move, to, for my money; he conducted several of the premieres and represents another direct link to the composer. So does Rozdestvensky: harder to obtain at the moment, his was the next complete cycle made by Melodiya after Kondrashin's. Early Russian digital recording techniques are bizarre, with very spotlit balances, but often this works to his advantage: his fifteenth is by far the most visceral in impact of all the readings I've yet heard - though I've a live one from Kondrashin on the way - and as a recording qua recording with a performance that still outshines much of the competition (Jansons included), Lopez-Cobos's 1 & 15 on Telarc is well worth investigation, too.

I'm always delighted to read that someone has discovered the Aulos box. Hope the joy continues, Robert.

I don't know who moans about the sound but I bet they're not people who discovered the recordings in the old Le Chant du monde CD versions. My goodness those were ropey... there's no comparison.

Strange as it may seem for someone with such a compulsion to collect, Bryn, I've not gone so far as to obtain the Melodiya set for myself yet. I have heard the transfer of the 4th, though not with the Aulos to hand, and on a system which I was new to: aural memory suggests that the transfer had a totally different sonic signature, and that reconstruction of the tricky moments where the tape had been damaged were handled differently - where the Aulos goes into mono, the Melodiya has some ambience added, and possibly a slightly different equalisation on each channel to effect a slighly wider spread. In any case, the Aulos is DSD based, whereas I rather think think the Melodiya is based on a standard PCM transfer.

However, the fact that there have been two recent attempts at restoring the cycle to circulation suggests that we're not alone in considering it the central pillar of recorded sets: as a conductor KK is consistently able to do justice to what is printed in the score whilst also exploiting the emotional context to a far greater degree than many of the competition (particularly, sadly, Jansons). That 4th, for example was recorded by the original performers within weeks of its belated premiere: the pride and commitment blaze out of it with an evangelical zeal: Jansons's version, with a pitifully restricted dynamic and emotional range, sounds like a dutiful read-through by comparison (to these ears, at least).

There are on the other hand yet others who aren't!