The conductor, Nikolai Malko was closely associated with the spectacular beginnings of Shostakovich’s musical career. Malko gave the first performance of Ills youthful  Symphony No 1  on 12 May 1926. The success of the symphony hurtled Shostakovich to instant fame, as his work was taken up by such conductors as Bruno Walter, Klemperer, and Toscanini, and found a permanent place in the concert repertoire

In the next three years prior to his emigration from the USSR, Malko not only continued to champion Shostakovich’s music, but acted as his mentor and friend. He took the credit for introducing the young Shostakovich to Ivan Sollertinsky, an extraordinarily erudite man with an enormous range of interests and the capacity to stimulate and provoke Through Sollertmsky’s influence Shostakovich was not only introduced to Mahler, but encouraged to enjoy all forms of music ‘from Bach to Offenbach’ and have no truck with musical snobs

In his student years Shostakovich had already acquired a legendary reputation for his powers of sight-reading, his amazing memory and his ability to assimilate music at lightning speed.   Tahiti Trot came into being in the autumn of 1928 as a consequence of a bet by Malko to test Shostakovich’s skills: the composer was challenged to orchestrate Vincent Youman’s Tea For Two in the space of an hour. Shostakovich there and then got down to work and within forty minutes had produced his brilliantly witty and original orchestration. Malko performed the Tahiti Trot (as the work was known m Russia) in Moscow on 25 November 1928 in a concert that included two other new Shostakovich works1 the Suite from the newly finished opera Τhe Nose , and Two Pieces By D. Scarlatti (another commission from Malko).

Tahiti Tiot acquired such popularity in Russia that it was played by dance bands in restaurants, and was included as an entr’acte before the third act of the ballet The Golden Age at the suggestion of the conductor Alexander Gauk It was the only number to be encored at every performance of the ballet.

In his student years, Shostakovich, with his insatiable musical curiosity, frequented concerts of visiting jazz musicians, and reported his delight at a jazz band that accompanied a ‘negro-operetta’ in 1925. However, jazz filtered through from the West to the Soviet Union selectively it was regarded with suspicion and hostility in certain quarters as a residue of bourgeois culture and decadence In 1930 Shostakovich made the acquaintance of the most famous and popular Soviet ‘jazz’ musician, Leonid Utyosov and his orchestra ‘Tea Jazz’ in Odessa This orchestra played a mixed bag of music, much of which it would be fairer to describe as popular light music than jazz. Shostakovich was most favourably impressed by Utyosov, regarding him as the greatest living artist in the Soviet Union.

In 1931 at the invitation of Utyosov and Isaac Dunaevsky, the writer of popular songs and marches, Shostakovich wrote (he music for a theatrical entertainment (or vaudeville) Hypotheltcatly Murdered. The show was an outrageous mixture of tongue-in-cheek satire and topical propaganda, and not surprisingly n soon closed alter a scandalous reception. Shostakovich’s score was a mixture of sparkling mischief and biting parody. As m his cinema music, he used this work as a ‘laboratory’ for experiment and the working out of musical ideas for his more ‘serious’ composition. But Shostakovich steered away from an attempt to include jazz in this work.

A few years later Shostakovich made a conscious attempt to write in a jazz idiom In 1934 he agreed To participate in a jazz-commission whose declared aim was to raise the level of Soviet jazz from popular ‘cafe’ music to music with a professional status. A competition was organised in Leningrad, and to encourage others Shostakovich wrote his three movement Jazz Suite No 1This was followed in 1938 by his Second Jazz Suite, written at the request of the newly formed State Orchestra for Jazz and its conductor Victor Knushevitsky. Both suites reveal Shostakovich’s brilliance and wit in orchestration, but the music hardly corresponds to the accepted understanding of jazz. Rather the composer utilises a light music idiom which he used extensively in his film and theatre music While the First Suite reflects the exuberance and decadence of the 1920s, the Second Suite is rooted in the Vienna of Johann Strauss, and has a forward eye to the Red Army.

After the premiere of the First Symphony. Shostakovich started thinking seriously of pursuing a pianistic career This was partly due to a creative block — after completing his First Symphony m July 1925 he wrote no music for over a year. When he did return to composition it was with two works for piano, his Piano Sonata No. 1 Op. 12 and the Aphorisms, op.13 , which he saw as vehicles for his own virtuosity.

In January 1927 Shostakovich was chosen to go with the Soviet team of pianists to the Chopin Competition in Warsaw The composer had set his hopes on winning the first prize, and was bitterly disappointed when he was only awarded a diploma. He ascribed the result to the prejudice o( the exclusively Polish jury, who favoured the Polish pianists over the Russians (seventeen of the thirty-one participants were Poles). Failure in this field prompted Shostakovich to concentrate his energy on composition, and gradually he relinquished his ambitions as a concert pianist. By 1930 he had virtually given up playing in public.

During the late 1920s and 1930s Shostakovich worked with remarkable speed and intensity, and produced a staggering variety and range of composition. The young composer seemed to enjoy moving from one diametrically opposed style of work to another. A striking example of this is the sharp contrast of the tragic opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtserisk District and the following two works for piano — the attractive and accessible Preludes op 34 and the Piano Concerto op.35, with its exuberant high spirits and predominant element of parody.  Both works were written with the aim of getting himself back into concert tours, which he enjoyed as a means of travelling and escaping from the pressures of life. The concerto is scored for string orchestra with a prominent solo trumpet part, written for the trumpeter of the Leningrad Philharmonic. (Soon Shostakovich was to prefer playing the work with the Moscow Philharmonic because of the expressive performance of their trumpeter. Yunev.) The work contains a wealth of in-joke quotations, where the composer defies the listener to search out the music’s sources, whether they be a Jewish street song from Odessa, a reference to Beethoven or Haydn, or parodying self-quotation. The quasi-sentimental Waltz of the second movement, with its allusions to the world of cinema, is in contrast to the outer movements, where the music romps boisterously through an endlessly changing kaleidoscope of tuneful themes. The four-movement work lasts just over twenty minutes, yet it contrives to give the impression of a cohesive whole This was probably the last important composition in which Shostakovich manifests the daring and high spirits of youth.

© Elizabeth Wilson (from  cds booklet)