World premiere recording on DVD and Blu-ray: Shostakovich's The Golden Age It is arguably Dmitri Shostakovich's most famous ballet, yet it has never seen a release on DVD and Blu-ray Disc. Yet The Golden Age, created in 1930, is undeniably one of the important key works in the popular Russian composer's stage oeuvre.
In this production, the ballet is danced by the world-famous ballet company of the Bolshoi Theater. The legendary Yuri Grigorovich is responsible for the choreography. So even for the most demanding Shostakovich and ballet fans, nothing is left to be desired! This is exactly how it should be!
The stage plot originally depicted the victory of the "proletariat" over a decadent "bourgeoisie". However, Shostakovich allowed himself (as was to be expected with this composer) many a musical sideswipe and counteracted the propagandistically colored plot musically in many ways. Thus he set the piece musically in the 1920s and annoyed the musical apparatchiks with plenty of borrowings from the European fashion music of that time (including surprising use of the then still very young electric guitar!), the necessity of which he subtly justified from the plot, because somehow one had to separate the "bourgeoisie" from the "proletariat". Yuri Grigorovich now gave the piece a new, more contemporary libretto, which reinterprets the class struggle as a fight against organized crime and now also includes a love story.