This is the third volume in Chandos’ ongoing series of Shostakovich film music, which has been receiving a great deal of attention on disc. All of this music has appeared in competing versions, some of them just as good as this, but none actually superior in any meaningful way. The playing is uniformly committed and atmospheric (great ghost music in Hamlet), and the frequent military bits come off excitingly without becoming obnoxiously strident. There’s a particularly wonderful moment in Five Days, Five Nights where Shostakovich gradually makes a vaguely Beethovenish tune morph into the “Joy” theme of the Ninth Symphony, and Vassily Sinaisky handles it especially well here.
The fake Rachmaninov piano concerto from The Unforgettable Year 1919 also is better played, and better recorded, in this performance than anywhere else (though Naxos offers the complete film score, of which this extract gives only a very limited and atypical impression). It only remains to be said that both Hamlet and Five Days, Five Nights constitute two of Shostakovich’s best works for the silver screen, and both are important because they also incorporate material that can be heard in the Eleventh, Twelfth, and Thirteenth symphonies. So if you like those works, and even if you don’t especially care about the film music, you should at least have these two pieces in your collection. Very enjoyable.
