Classical Music

A Broadway-style musical comedy set on a Soviet housing estate is the last thing you'd expect from Shostakovich, the secret historian of the Stalin years and a composer better known for evoking the midnight terrors of the knock on the door than toe-tapping song 'n' dance routines.

But there was always a glint of humour - albeit of a wry, sarcastic cast - lurking behind those impenetrable jam-jar glasses, and just as the Ninth Symphony provided an unexpectedly flippant flipside to the dour siege-mentality of the wartime Seventh, so Moscow, Cheryomushki offered a comic counterpoint to the lurid lowlife squalor and murderous mayhem of the composer's Terror-time opera, The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.

Completed in 1958, Cheryomushki marked Shostakovich's return to the stage after the Zhdanov Decree against 'musical formalism' had effectively banned him from public performance 10 years before. At first sight, the score's exuberantly tuneful celebration of the latest five-year housing plan might seem to place Cheryomushki in the same class of 'creative reply to just criticism' as the Fifth Symphony - the composer's apparently back-tracking response to Pravda's pre-war attacks on the avant-garde antics of his Lady Macbeth.

Yet, writing here during the brief Khrushchev thaw that followed Stalin's death, Shostakovich was able to slip an undercoat of bitter satire beneath the music's Soviet Realist gloss and even to bury a few quotes from his own banned works among the brickwork of folk melodies, popular tunes, dance numbers and parodies of Russian classics from which the score is built.

Perhaps the satire was too strong for Russian tastes and too subtle for the West. Either way, the work has not been seen anywhere since 1959. Full marks, then, to Pimlico Opera for giving us its long-awaited British premiere, directed by Lucy Bailey, reorchestrated by Gerard McBurney and starring, among others, Richard Suart as Barabashkin, the caretaker of the idyllically named Cherry Trees Estate, and Anna Barkan as Lidochka (left), the young newcomer who finds her hopes of housing happiness thwarted by the local party apparatchik.

Lyric Theatre, King St, W6, 19-29 Oct (081-741 2311) pounds 5-pounds 15 (Mon-Thu, Sat mat), pounds 10-pounds 20 (Fri-Sat)

(Photograph omitted)