Utwory na płycie:

• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act I: Prelude and night patrol / Shepherd's horn
• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act III: The guests' entrance
• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act III: The tuning of the instruments
• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act III: Prelude
• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act III: Love scene of the Player-King and Player-Queen
• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act III: The poisoner's entrance / Poisoning music / The poisoner's exit / Episode after the poisoner's exit
• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act III: "And thou shalt live ..." / "Nor earth to me give food …" / "To you forwever I give my love …" / "My spirits grow dull …"
• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act III: Scene with a recorder / Episode after the scene with a recorder
• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act III: Pantomime
• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act III: Hamlet carries off the body of Polonius (I and II)
• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act IV: The King distracts the Queen / Fight
• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act I: Funeral March / Exit of the King and Queen
• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act IV: The King is brought on / Claudius' monologue
• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act IV: Fortinbras' trumpet calls
• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act IV: The Feast
• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act IV: Romance sung at the feast
• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act IV: can-can
• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act IV: Ophelia's ditty
• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act IV: Lullaby
• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act V: Introduction to the graveyard scene / Gravedigger's song
• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act V: The beggars passing by / Requiem
• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act V: Joust / Flourish / Quick fight / Slow fight
• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act I: Dinner Music
• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act V: Fortinbras' march
• Hamlet 1954 Production: Gigue
• Hamlet 1954 Production: Finale
• King Lear Op. 58a 1941 Production: Prelude and Cordelia's ballad
• King Lear Op. 58a 1941 Production: The return from the hunt
• King Lear Op. 58a 1941 Production - The Fool's ten songs: He who decides / Fools had ne'er less grace in a year / he that keeps nor crust nor crumb
• King Lear Op. 58a 1941 Production - The Fool's ten songs: The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long / Fathers that wear rags
• King Lear Op. 58a 1941 Production - The Fool's ten songs: When priests are more in word than matter / A fox when one has caught her / The cod piece that will house
• King Lear Op. 58a 1941 Production - The Fool's ten songs: He that has and a tiny little wit / That sir which serves and seeks for gain
• King Lear Op. 58a 1941 Production - Finale of Act I
• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act I: Flourish and dance music / Finale of Act I
• King Lear Op. 58a 1941 Production: The approach of the storm
• King Lear Op. 58a 1941 Production: The scene on the heath
• King Lear Op. 58a 1941 Production: The blinding of Gloucester
• King Lear Op. 58a 1941 Production: The military encampment / Fanfares
• King Lear Op. 58a 1941 Production: March
• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act II: Hamlet and the small boys walking past / Ophelia and Polonius' gallop
• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act II: Hamlet and Posencrantz's scene
• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act II: The actor's arrival / Exit of Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act II: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's dialogue
• Hamlet Op. 32 - Act II: The Hunt

Hamlet Op. 32 1932 Premiere Production
Hamlet 1954 Production
King Lear Op. 58a 1941 Production
The Fool’s ten songs

Signum Records are delighted to present the second recording on SignumClassics of the CBSO, under the direction of Mark Elder.

In his youth Shostakovich devoted much time and energy to composing for the theatre and the cinema, writing for an astonishing variety of movies, political plays, satires, the music-hall and the ballet.

The music for Nikolai Akimov’s outrageous and scandalous production of Hamlet was composed in the winter of 1931 – 1932. Akimov had decided that tragedy was irrelevant to the modern Soviet audience, and therefore presented the play as a satirical farce in which the play was turned up-side-down, by reversing all the usual assumptions about the plot and how it should be acted. The alterations to Shakespeare’s work are reflected in the titles of several of Shostakovich’s numbers. He was asked to provide music for scenes that Shakespeare only refers to but which Akimov insisted on representing on stage, for example the feast where "funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables". The overall character of Shostakovich’s music is often abrasive and satirical, and flippant just where we would expect the music to be more serious. There are also some funny moments, with particular sharp parodies of various well-known musico-theatrical clichés.

In 1954 Kozintsev had also attempted to direct a staged version of Hamlet. For this occasion he decided to reuse music that Shostakovich had already written for him to use in a staged production of King Lear in 1941. All that Kozintsev asked Shostakovich to add for the 1954 Hamlet were a Gigue and a Finale, both of which are included on this recording as an appendix to the music for Akimov’s 1932 production.

The music that Shostakovich wrote for Kozintsev’s 1941 King Lear production inhabits a strange and transitional world, halfway between the bright and brilliant sarcasm of the music for Akimov’s Hamlet of ten years earlier and the more soberly functional manner of his post-war theatrical music. Gone is most of the cheekiness, the fondness for the experimental and the grotesque. There is much in this often oppressively dark music that is characteristic of what was by now Shostakovich’s public symphonic manner.

Perhaps the most powerful and unusual part of the score is the bizarre cycle of Fool’s songs, with which the Fool mocks the mistakes of his master, the King, in the course of the first three Acts. The music of these songs is as strange and quirky as the words they set. Taken as a whole, these ten songs make up a miniature cycle of sourly absurd, almost expressionistic outbursts for voice and orchestra. They seem to form a whole in themselves, standing apart from