Shostakovich was still a young composer when he was hired to provide incidental music for The Bedbug, a surreal and farcical satire on Communist utopian dreams and bourgeois corruption and vulgarity. He produced a terrifically knockabout score that draws on local fireman’s bands and American dance music. Illustrated by Shostakovich’s powerful middle-period music, Love and Hate is a film about female fortitude set in a mining village during the 1919 Civil War. The innovative score, newly reconstructed by Mark Fitz-Gerald from rough piano sketches and the 1935 soundtrack, combines symphonic sections with popular songs.

This release represents a continuation of Mark Fitz-Gerald’s sterling work in reconstructing Shostakovich’s film music from the 1930s. Previous critically acclaimed successes in this field include Odna (‘Alone’) (8570316), and The Girlfriends and other lost scores (8572138) turned into a world premiere release considered by Gramophone to be something that ‘should be in every Shostakovich collection’ (Holiday Critics’ Choice).

Mark Fitz-Gerald’s subsequent work on Shostakovich’s New Babylon (857282425) was nominated for an International Classical Music Award and was a MusicWeb International ‘Recording of the Year’, with comments like ‘one of Naxos’ finest ever discs. Superb music-making allied to a seriously impressive scholarly reconstruction of a very important score.’ The most recent previous release in 2017 was The Gadfly (8573747) which also features the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz, ‘here restored to the more subtle and varied colours of Shostakovich’s original orchestration’ (BBC Music Magazine).