Roughly half of Shostakovich’s music for the extraordinary satirical production of Hamlet in Moscow in 1932 is comparatively well known. He compiled a Suite of 13 movements which has been one of Gennadi Rozhdestvensky’s party pieces in concert (his matchless recording of it – HMV Melodiya, 12/77 – is currently unavailable). The other half has been lurking in Volumes 27 and 28 of the Complete Edition, waiting for the initiative of someone like Gerard McBurney to get them performed and recorded.
This is not a tour de force along the lines of McBurney’s reconstruction of the uproarious Hypothetically Murdered (United Recordings, 1/94). But he has produced inventive and idiomatic orchestrations of the five numbers apparently excised before Hamlet went into production; of these the “Tuning of the Instruments” in Act 2 is wittily done, and the music for “The beggars passing by” in Act 5 is intriguingly experimental in style. If the remaining movements are mainly inconsequential snippets they nevertheless confirm Shostakovich’s facility in hitting the theatrical mark.
The music for Kozintsev’s 1941 staging of King Lear is the obvious coupling, but no less welcome for that, and for completeness we also have the two pieces Kozintsev required to flesh out his 1954 production of Hamlet (which otherwise reused the Lear music!).
Performances are never less than effective (though presto movements are somewhat sedate) and recording quality is efficient rather than refined. Louise Winter is convincingly idiomatic in Ophelia’s songs, and David Wilson-Johnson makes a more than passable Fool. This is a valuable addition to the Shostakovich discography.'