Shostakovich Suite for Variety Orchestra – A Misnamed Masterwork

There is a persistent and slightly embarrassing confusion in the Shostakovich discography, and it goes like this: for years, a piece called the “Jazz Suite No. 2” circulated on recordings and in concert programs — the suite that opens with the waltz you’ve heard in a hundred films and advertisements — and almost nobody stopped to ask whether Shostakovich had actually called it that. He hadn’t. What he wrote, probably in the late 1950s, was this Suite for Variety Orchestra, a sequence of dances and marches assembled for purposes that remain, even now, genuinely unclear. The “Jazz Suite No. 2” label was a well-intentioned mistake that stuck for decades, and the music suffered a certain condescension because of it — as though a piece traveling under a wrong passport couldn’t quite be taken seriously.

Vladimir Spivakov takes it seriously. Rightly so.

The suite’s origins are tangled in the usual Soviet-era murk. Shostakovich wrote the material; the orchestration and arrangement, with near-certainty, came from Levon Atovmyan, a figure of real importance in Soviet musical life who still hasn’t received his due from Western scholars. Atovmyan was a close friend of Shostakovich’s and a skilled arranger who worked so sympathetically — or, depending on your view, so freely — with the composer’s raw material that the two voices are sometimes difficult to disentangle. The suite’s “Finale,” in particular, is barely Shostakovich at all; it’s Atovmyan composing on Shostakovich, the way a skilled jazz pianist might improvise on a standard until the original tune is more ghost than skeleton. Whether this matters is a question the music itself declines to answer.

What Atovmyan brought, unmistakably, is sumptuous padding — lush inner voices, a fondness for the kind of orchestral velvet that Shostakovich in his purely personal moments tended to avoid. The suite doesn’t sound like the Eighth Symphony or the late string quartets. It sounds like a Saturday night.

Spivakov, who built his early reputation as a violinist of considerable distinction before turning to conducting, draws on that background in the most direct way imaginable. His strings in the National Philharmonic of Russia — a different entity, worth clarifying, from either the Russian National Orchestra or the Russian Philharmonic Orchestra — play with a richness and unanimity that few orchestras can match in this repertoire. When the theme returns near the close of “Waltz No. 1,” the sound is genuinely luxurious, the kind of playing that makes you sit back and simply listen, argument suspended.

The “March” opens the suite with just the right combination of swagger and forward motion — not breathless, not stiff, but propulsive in the way that good march playing always is, with a sense that the band knows where it’s going. Both the “March” and the “Finale” draw on Shostakovich’s score to the 1940 film The Adventures of Korzinkina, and Spivakov manages the transition from functional film music to concert-hall entertainment without making either element feel compromised. The “Dance No. 1,” borrowed from the “People’s Holiday” cue in The Gadfly, has a balletic spring to it here — light on the beat, quick in the articulation, the woodwinds darting.

The waltzes are handled at moderate tempi, and Spivakov allows his strings a degree of portamento that will strike some listeners as nostalgic and others as indulgent. I lean toward the former. It lends the rendition a quality of slightly faded glamour — Lawrence Welk, perhaps, or the late-night television orchestras of another era, when a string section playing a waltz was considered entertainment rather than irony. “Waltz No. 2,” the famous one, carries this off with real feeling. You can hear why the piece became ubiquitous.

The disc has been released with minimal fanfare, available only as a download, and it will likely reach only the already-converted. That’s a shame. This is music that deserves a wider hearing — not as a curiosity or a footnote to the serious Shostakovich, but as a piece of genuine craft and considerable charm. Spivakov understands both qualities, and his National Philharmonic delivers them with style.

Recommended without reservation, and with some impatience toward the commercial machinery that buries recordings like this one.