In 1931 Shostakovich wrote a full-length score for the Leningrad Music Hall, for a show that involved many of the leading entertainers of the day, as well as dancing girls, a jazz band, a dancing dog, sequences of silent film, simulated air-raids and gas attacks, a lorry, a storm, waiters and waitresses in a luxury restaurant, river nymphs and even a scene in Heaven with the Devil, the Twelve Apostles, the Archangel Gabriel and all the other angels doing a blasphemous knees-up. The show was naturally a momentary scandal and the score soon disappeared. In 1991 Gerard McBurney reconstructed from the surviving sketches a sequence of 21 of the orchestral numbers to make a hilarious sequence of gallops, saucy polkas, marches and schmoozy waltzes.
Natalia de Froberville
as Mashenka Kurochkin
Artyom Mishakov
as Stopka Kurochkin
Sergei Mershin
as Beyburzhuyev
German Starikov
as Angel
Anna Pushvintseva-Poistogova
as Showy Lady
Eugenia Chetverikova
as Dancing Couple
Denis Tolmazov
as Dancing Couple
Lyaisan Gisatullina
as Barmaid
Alexey Budrin
as Accordion Player
