Pushkin House's video: Alexander Karpeyev plays Shostakovich s Football Op 66 No 2

Pushkin House's music curator Sasha Karpeyev plays this fun choreographic divertissement from Shostakovich's incidental music to the play 'Russian River' (1944). Russian River was a song and dance spectacle written for and performed by the NKVD Song and Dance Ensemble - the entertainment arm of Stalin's secret police. A wartime piece intended to keep up morale, the suite also includes a march, a waltz, a piece entitled 'The Battle of Stalingrad', and a final chorus. This lively interlude references one of Shostakovich's great passions: football. He had already written a whole ballet about the subject in 1930, called 'The Golden Age'. https://www.akarpeyev.com https://www.pushkinhouse.org