Shostakovich’s vaudeville vein may be worlds away from the great symphonies and string quartets‚ but it too can inspire controversy. The Bolt is a case in point. A balletic product of Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan and the years of ‘proletarian’ ascendancy on the musical front‚ its scenario is an embarrassment. Even if you only want excerpts‚ you’ll have to choose between the version of the suite we have here and that favoured by Riccardo Chailly in which the composer drops two of the eight numbers and changes some of the titles to deflect attention from the storyline. As Richard Whitehouse points out in a useful note‚ what we used to call the Jazz Suite No 2 recently turned out to be something else entirely. Its UK publisher‚ Boosey & Hawkes‚ would prefer us to start referring to the music recorded here as the Suite for Variety Orchestra‚ Gerard McBurney’s reconstruction of the unrelated dance band original being the real Jazz Suite No 2. Confusingly‚ Shostakovich went on to recycle one of the light orchestral numbers in his film score The Gadfly‚ while‚ long after his death‚ Stanley Kubrick borrowed the ‘Second Waltz’ to serve alongside Ligeti and Pook in his final movie Eyes Wide Shut. It’s track 14 if you’re looking for it. Problems of identification apart‚ Dmitry Yablonsky has some big-name competition. At full price‚ Chailly and the Concertgebouw couple the Jazz Suites (so-called) and Tahiti Trot with the First Piano Concerto on a famously successful ‘Jazz Album’; The Bolt suite appeared on the follow-up‚ all-Shostakovich ‘Dance Album’ made in Philadelphia. In the absence of Rozhdestvensky’s pioneering Melodiya version of Tahiti Trot‚ itself a transmogrification of Vincent Youmans’s Tea for two‚ it is useful to have the piece in a reading with a certain sweet boulevardier charm. Yes‚ Rozhdestvensky’s snappy LP was more detailed in its nuancing‚ more satirical in intent and without the newcomer’s heavy-handed final pay-off‚ but Yablonsky’s way works well enough. So is this another winner from Naxos? I think so. This is hardly material that requires luxury casting. Indeed‚ there is a case for saying it is best heard in the sort of cut-and-paste miscellanies offered by Chant du Monde (11/99) and Delos (12/99)‚ where Constantine Orbelian zeroes in on waltz numbers apart from a rather tepid [fox]trot. Not that Naxos’s orchestra lacks distinction: this is Svetlanov’s old band‚ so you can expect colourful winds and penetrating brass – good intentions without excessive refinement. Try the Weill-like ‘Foxtrot’ from the Jazz Suite No 1 (track 19) and I dare say you’ll be hooked: those trombone glissandos are nicely done‚ the Hawaiian guitar slyly insinuating. The recorded sound has been decently managed‚ without the excessive resonance that can blunt the impact of this repertoire.