Music For Soviet Films

"Shostakovich's involvement with the cinema dates to his youth in Leningrad. Shostakovich composed his first screen score in 1929, three years after his swift rise to fame with his startling 'First Symphony', and the same year he began the Age of Gold ballet. The film was The New Babylon, a writer-director collaboration by Shklovski and Trauberg - Michurin began in 1946, after the end of World War 2. By then, Shostakovich had achieved a formidable reputation as composer all over the world. And though the fact went unrecognized outside the Soviet Union, he was also an old hand at film composing. Shostakovich's score incomparably enhanced the motion picture - A Year Is Worth a Lifetime, directed by the gifted Grigory Roshal, is a dramatization of the life and work of Karl Marx - Grigory Roshal says of Shostakovich's contribution to the film: 'His music complemented and deepened the drama and served well the chief idea of the scenario - that of revolution, and of lofty service to broad humanity. The changing emotional states, feelings and reactions of Marx, the historic events of his times, and the lives of people around him - all were skillfully expressed in Shostakovich's music.'" - from the original liner notes.