Jazz Suites 1 & 2

A truly excellent CD from the performance and recording quality point of view. Friends who have heard it agree.

We heard this music played on a Sprint Ad on television and hunted it down. We found the entire recording to be a delight!

I've highly enjoyed this brilliant collection of Shostakovich. Recommended to every music lover!

I'm astonished that no one has reviewed this CD (until now) which came out over a year ago. It is an astonishingly assured set of performances by the youngish cellist turned conductor, Dmitry Yablonsky, and the Russian State Orchestra. (And, even better, there is a DVD-Audio of these same performances that just came out and it is in superb surround sound. Yeehaw!)

This is Shostakovich at his most accessible. It's all jazzy, tuneful, interestingly orchestrated (he does things with the xylophone that he must have picked up from watching cartoons with music by Carl Stallings--do you suppose?). And there are some saxophone licks that couldn't have been composed by anyone but a Russian (although, the idea came to me after imagining in my mind's ear the saxophone solos in Musorgsky's 'Pictures at an Exhibition' and the most familiar orchestration of THAT is by a Frenchman, Ravel--oh, well, the TUNE is Russian).

This is, in fact, music that Shostakovich wrote in imitation of American popular music. [In fact, 'Tahiti Trot' is his take of Vincent Youmans's 'Tea for Two.'] There's even a Sousa march in the first Jazz Suite. And he gets it all almost right and inimitably Shostakovian as well. It's right enough that American listeners will probably be fooled--if they listen to it without knowing the composer--into believingt it had to be by someone like Ferde Grofe or Gershwin or even Leroy Anderson.

My point is this: this is Shostakovich's happiest, bounciest, most accessible music. And on top of that it's beautifully written and performed. I don't know what you're waiting for.

I had my wife waltzing around the listening room just a few days ago to a new recording of waltzes by Lehar. But I grabbed her again when I'd cranked this one up and we waltzed and polka'd and even tango'd. It's impossible to resist.

Recommended heartily. And even more so, if you've got the equipment for it, I recommend the new DVD-Audio version.

Scott Morrison