MARBECKS COLLECTABLE: Shostakovich: The Young Lady and the Hooligan Op 124c (ballet)

Shostakovich composed many ballet scores, which kept the income flowing in and also kept him in the good books of the increasingly brutal dictatorship of Josef Stalin as many of these ballets were little more than Soviet propaganda exercises. The subject matter ranged from romantic comedies set on collective farms, a story about the Soviet football team, to a comedy set in an industrial complex under threat of sabotage. In 1936 he had sailed perilously close to the wind and had his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk banned by the authorities. His Fourth Symphony was also withdrawn and had to wait until 1963 for its premiere. Shostakovich's original ballet scores such as The Bolt and The Golden Age are reasonably well known. However, works such as The Limpid Stream are less well known. Early in the 1950s the composer allowed Levon Atovmyan to arrange all the scores in four ballet suites for large orchestra.

These suites raided the scores of the ballets and the numerous film scores. In the early 1960 new ballets were devised for the music. The most successful was Baryishnya I khuligan (The Lady and the Hooligan), a one-act ballet of 13 numbers, and is a story of a young lady who is sent as a supply teacher to a school where a violent gang form most of the class. A bond develops between her and one of the boys, but on day the gang attempt to mug the teacher. The boy defends her, and is beaten senseless by his 'friends' and dies in the young lady's arms. Much of the music for the ballet is from other works, The Limpid Stream, the Cello Sonata and The Bolt in particular, but also from the famous romance from The Gadfly film score.