Ballet Suite No. 1 (arr. Atovmyan)

arranged by Levon Atovmyan (1901-73)

Ballet Suite No.1

Lyric Waltz

Dance

Romance

Polka

Waltz-Scherzo

Galop

At the end of 1935 Shostakovich, who was enjoying huge popular success with his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk - it had achieved over 170 performances in two years in Leningrad and Moscow alone - was regarded as the leading light of Soviet composers. Within a month, after Stalin had taken a strong dislike to Lady Macbeth in a new production at the Bolshoi and Pravda had denounced it in a notorious article headed “Muddle Instead of Music,” he had fallen into disgrace. His third ballet The Limpid Stream which had been running at the Maly Theatre in Leningrad for as long as six months, was denounced in another Pravda article, “Ballet Falsehood,” shortly afterwards. Both works were, of course, immediately removed from the stage and the forthcomimg Fourth Symphony was withdrawn before it could be heard. The composer would not be rehabilitated until the first performance of his Fifth Symphony (“a Soviet artist’s reply to just criticism”) towards the end of 1937. The Fourth Symphony was withheld until 1961.

Since, as far as he could see, none of his pre-war stage works stood much chance of revival, Shostakovich readily assented to a request from his friend Lev Atovmyan for permission to assemble a suite of excerpts from The Limpid Stream and one or two other politically incorrect scores from the same period. Out of their context, the selected pieces would no longer suggest a flippant attitude to Soviet ideals, like collectivisation and the Five Year Plan, and would cause no offence.

Completed in 1949, Ballet Suite No.1 - there would be three more Ballet Suites drawn from similar sources within the next four years - contains four mainly satirical numbers from The Limpid Stream. It begins not with ballet music, however, but with a symphonic version of a waltz from the first of Shostakovich’s two Jazz Suites where, with its trumpet and saxophone solos, it sounds rather more idiomatic than it does in the present Khachaturian-style full-orchestral arrangment. The first three items from The Limpid Stream contrast a cheerful Dance with a melodious Romance and an extravagantly witty Polka. After a delighfully mischievous Waltz-Scherzo from Shostakovich’s first ballet Bolt (about industrial sabotage, if you can believe it), the Suite ends with an energetic and authentically vulgar Galop from The Limpid Stream.

Gerald Larner ©2006