| This disc was nominated for the 1998 Grammy Award for "Best Orchestral Performance."
Contrary to popular opinion, Dmitri Shostakovich was not just a "serious" composer. “The Dance Album”, an inspired collection  Shostakovich's "entertainment" music (or as some musicologists like to consider it, the lighter side of Shostakovich), proves that angst and torment were not the only temperaments associated with this great composer. Remarkably, Shostakovich often found himself in circumstances that required him to work on serious and lighter works at virtually the same time. 'The Gadfly,' a delightfully boisterous film score, was written between the Tenth Symphony and the First Violin Concerto. Shortly after the commercial fiasco of his opera 'Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,' Shostakovich wrote 'Moskva, Cheremushki,' a three-act musical comedy which shows the composer's immense talent for pastiche and parody. "The Bolt" is a ballet that tells the story of a band of workers in a new industrial society pitted against drunks, loafers and all sorts of layabouts. It includes a wide range of comical effects, from the work's opening parody of Tchaikovsky's Fourth symphony to the prevalence of squawking brass lines that serves to characterize many of the ballet's eccentric characters. |
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