DVD review
Olga Zabotkina (Lidochka), Marina Khotuntseva (Masha), Svetlana Zhivankova (Lyusya), Marina Polbentseva (Vava), Vladimir Vasilyev (Boris), Grigori Bortnikov (Sasha), Vladimir Zemlyanikin (Sergey), Vasili Merkuryev Drebednev)
Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra c.Nikolai Rabinovich, d. Gerbert Rappaport,
A Lenfilm Production. Decca 1475 (87 mins)
This is the first western release of the 1963 Soviet film version of Shostakovich’s housing estate operetta Moscow Cheryomushki (‘Cherry Town’, as ubiquitous a misnomer as Springfield is in the USA) – a highly sanitized snapshot of Soviet urban regeneration. Fun is poked at the bureaucratic ineptitudes of an oppressive system, but with a bantering, even affectionate tone, light-years from the biting satire that one tends to associate with Shostakovich. The production values are fun, there is much slapstick and everything, even the housing estate under construction, looks squeaky clean and brightly coloured. The music is inevitably heavily cut, and even though Shostakovich later dismissed his own confection, several of the tunes are catchy, if rather blander than one might expect from his populist early film and ballet scores. The mono sound is forward and bright, the singing voices are not so oppressively forward as in the contemporary film version of Katerina Ismailova (also available on Decca). The three young couples are all easy on the eye and ear, and though in some cases the disparity between singing and spoken voices seem implausible, there are no separately credited singers, as if often the case with Soviet opera films of the same vintage; thus I assume we are seeing and hearing real singers, without the aid of Soviet Marni Nixons. Only some dodgy lip-synching, a few technical oversights and close-ups revealing mouthfuls of less than perfect teeth differentiate this from standard 1950’s Hollywood fare featuring the likes of Doris Day or Bing Crosby, though the lunacy of some of the set pieces is more reminiscent of the pre-code musicals of Lubitsch or Mamoulian. This is not so surprising, as the intriguing career path of the Viennese born director Herbert (later russified to Gerbert) Rappaport takes in assistantships to Pabst, then Hollywood, before being tempted to the Soviet Union to make anti Nazi films, where he stayed, becoming a prominent director with the Soviet state-funded production company Lenfilm. A highlight is a preposterously costumed dance number in a half built apartment, a construction site and on a crane that lurches through various historical periods. Inevitably the work disappoints; as recent stage versions have demonstrated by attempted to shore-up the weak ending with rewrites, there is no denying the book implodes badly at the end. Here, the device of a bench, which forces the truth from anyone who sits on it, is as tiresome as one of Gilbert’s lozenges.
Highly recommended all the same: a fascinatingly manipulated counter-glimpse of an epoch we inevitably associate with extreme grimness.
[first published in OPERA magazine]
© JULIAN GRANT 2009