Dmitri Shostakovich and the theatre and film director Grigori Kozintsev collaborated on two acclaimed Shakespeare film adaptations, Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1970). Both plays deal with leadership, conscience, honour and social responsibility, themes which increasingly absorbed both Kozintsev and Shostakovich, who discuss them in their writings. Along with Don Quixote they also feature characters who in some way or another are or seem to be mad. Moreover, the Shakespeare films both end with funerals, leaving the state leaderless and at risk of attack. Ostensibly reminders that the Soviet Union needed to be strong and united, they could equally be seen as criticisms of a state under the control of an incorrigibly corrupt regime. Kozintsev stressed Hamlet’s contemporaneity: “We are not in a museum but facing the conflicts of modern man”, but the way that some of his comments relate the film to revolutionary theory is half-hearted at best. This was a potentially dangerous strategy, but the ‘classic adaptation’, especially of Shakespeare, helped clothe them in acceptability. In any case he had been planning the film for several years so we cannot map it too closely to the events of the 1960s and the ousting of Khrushchev in late 1964.

Shostakovich was particularly happy with this score, though a planned symphonic poem on the same theme came to nothing, and he turned instead to his Ninth String Quartet. The film won prizes at various film festivals while the score was acclaimed and used for several Hamlet ballets. In 1964 Shostakovich’s friend Lev Atovmian arranged a suite and its eight movements have been integrated into this recording of the published score.