DMITRI SOSTAKOVIC – ‘THE CHASE’ (from ‘Korzinkina adventures’) – arrangement for piano and string quartet

THE CHASE is, originally, a piece for four-hands piano that is included in the soundtrack composed by Dmitri Shostakovich for the comedy movie ‘The adventures of Korzinkina’ (1940) directed by Klimentiy Mints. Yanya Korzinkina is a beautiful young railway clerk, always ready to help anyone. So naturally everyone loves her, including a young singer, played by the famous clown Musin, on his way to a music-competition. But when he reaches the stage conks out and is only able to whistle. After many hardships, she jumps on to the stage, kisses him passionately, and he miraculously gets his (bass) voice back, allowing him to win the contest with the performance of Musorsgkij’s ‘Song of the fly’. The work is a kind of ‘anti kino-konsert’ in which ‘Great Art’ is mocked (remarkable is the comic arrangement of the ‘Death of the swan’ by Čajkovskij and the recitation of some verses of Lermontov abruptly stopped by bizzarre events). The movie went out in the movie theaters on the November 11th, 1940 just after the completion of the score that, however, wasn’t preserved in its entirety (between the lost parts there is THE CHASE too); for this reason the music source to which I turned for this work is the audio recording of the four-hands version reconstructed by Gennady Rozhdestvensky. The arrangement for piano and string quartet was commissioned by the Delian Quartet for the project Metamorphoses presented in the BeethovenFest Bonn 2013 with the collaboration of the piano player Anatol Ugorsky and it has been recorded on cd for OEHMS CLASSIC.

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