Shostakovich was known for his fun-loving attitude during his early years as a composer. The colourful incidental music for The Shot – reconstructed by Mark Fitz-Gerald from the original piano scores – vividly evokes the raucous life of experimental youth theatre in Leningrad during the late 1920s. This carefree world had changed dramatically by 1934 when Shostakovich completed his music for The Human Comedy – a work that creates a charming atmosphere of Parisian escapism. Discarded movements from his first opera The Nose form an entire orchestral suite. The programme concludes with Mark Fitz-Gerald’s reconstruction of the March of the Anarchists, transcribed by ear from the film The Vyborg Side.

This release follows on from a number of Mark Fitz-Gerald’s work on Shostakovich’s music for film and theatre, including The Bedbug (Naxos 8574100), which proved to be ‘a delight’ for Limelight, and The Girlfriends (8572138), a treasure trove of rarities with no fewer than four world-premiere recordings.

Mark Fitz-Gerald is regarded as ‘one of the indispensable Shostakovich interpreters of our time’, with enormously successful performances all over the world. He has made this new recording with the Malmö Opera Orchestra and Chorus, all veterans of numerous recordings for Naxos, including an acclaimed DVD of Puccini’s La Bohème (Naxos 2110385), and an ‘excellent’ (Fanfare) album of works by Fauré and Poulenc (8574570).

Mark Fitz-Gerald has performed the Trauberg/Shostakovich classic New Babylon (1929) to great critical acclaim, in particular at the Japanese premiere of the work (opening concert of the Tokyo Summer Festival in 2000) and the Rotterdam Gergiev Festival 2001. With the help of Mrs Irina Shostakovich and Krzystof Meyer he restored the complete score to another Trauberg/Shostakovich film, Odna (1929), and conducted the world premiere (the first Shostakovich premiere for over twenty years) in Holland and later in Paris, with enormous success. From 1989 to 1993 he was associate conductor of the Orquesta de Porto (Orquesta Classica do Porto, Portugal). He was assistant conductor in Strasbourg both at the Philharmonic Orchestra and at the Opéra du Rhin from 1997 to 2002. In 2012 he made his debut with the London Philharmonic, and gave the Swiss premiere of Debussy’s The Fall of the House of Usher. In 2016 at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival Fitz-Gerald conducted, to wide acclaim, his reconstruction of Mortimer Wilson’s vast 1924 score for the Douglas Fairbanks film The Thief of Bagdad.