Salute to Spain!

1.Fanfares  2.Song of Rosita  3.Funeral March  4.Fragment  5.March


Shostakovich’s incidental music to this drama about the Spanish Civil War was written during one of the darkest times of his life, between the composition of two masterpieces, the 4th and 5th Symphonies, when he was living under a fearful cloud of political threat and suspicion. Most of this score is lost. What survives includes two sombre and heroic marches which look forward to the massive and newly simplified language of the 5th Symphony, on which he was to begin work only a few months later, and the sweetly nostalgic and deliberately Spanish-sounding ‘Song about Rosita’. This is perhaps the nearest that Shostakovich every got to writing flamenco.


Hardly known, this music would make a striking concert-opener before the performance of a much larger work like the 5th Symphony.


Note by Gerard McBurney