It's a cause for wonder that
Andre Kostelanetz thought it was a good idea to mix movements from
Shostakovich's musical comedy Moscow, Cheryomushki, his ballet The Age of Gold, his score for the film The Gadfly, and two of his ballet suites in no discernible order and release the result in a record called The Light Music of Shostakovich. Despite having composed some of the most passionately pessimistic music of the twentieth century,
Shostakovich certainly did write light music, but he had already arranged much of his light music in suites from his films and ballets, and those suites are ideal collections of the light music of
Shostakovich. The same cannot be said of this collection by
Kostelanetz. Rather, it is a seemingly random collection of galops, waltzes, polkas, and miscellana that careens from bathetic to banal, from trite to tawdry, from dimwitted to flat-out dumb. Nor is
Kostelanetz's collection well conducted: the tempo shifts are botched, and the textures are blotched. Nor is
Kostelanetz's collection well played: whatever musicians made up his orchestra, they seem to have rarely performed together and to more rarely agree on details of ensemble or intonation. Even the production of
Teo Macero -- the producer of so many fine
Miles Davis/Gil Evans records -- seems crass and uncouth. From every point of view, this is a disaster.