Zoya: Suite

Konstantin Simonov (R)

Score for the film by Boris Chirskov and Lev Arnshtam.


Shostakovich wrote just one film-score during war-time.  ‘Zoya’, directed by Lev Arnshtam, was based on the true story of an 18-year-old girl, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, who fought heroically against the Germans in the early months of the Nazi invasion, was captured, brutally tortured and finally hanged.


While ‘Zoya’ undoubtedly belongs to the genre of Shostakovich’s ‘patriotic’ scores, this is an unusual piece. It was written soon after the mighty 8th Symphony, but in a much simpler style, shot through with the shared romanticism and idealism that so many older Russians still remember from those terrible times. This is not a score in praise of Stalin or Communism, but an emotional appeal to ordinary folk, using an old-fashioned musical language with echoes of Tchaikovsky.


Lev Atovmyan managed to find room for most of this warmly accessible sound-track in his concert-suite, cleverly reordering the many fragments into five movements. He begins with an almost Wagnerian passage involving a heavenly choir, and works his way through marches, landscapes, elegies and tender love music, to end with Shostakovich’s splendid reworking of one of the most popular tunes in all Russian music, the noble ‘Slava!’ from the end of Glinka’s patriotic opera ‘A Life for the Tsar’.


Note by Gerard McBurney