| Amazon.com essential recording: Continuing Riccardo Chailly's topical Shostakovich recordings (he's already visited the composer's jazz-inflected and dance pieces), this collection of music for film offers the series greater heft. The music here is as entangled in politics and pop culture as the jazzy and dancy material, but here the emotions are more complex and the execution more exciting. The films Shostakovich was scoring somehow sought legitimacy or outright approval from Soviet power regimes, but as in all his music, Shostakovich enacted subtle subversions. The parade-step march cadences of The Counterplan are exaggerated just enough to integrate all kinds of conflicting dark undertows, emphasized coyly by Chailly and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. The excerpts from Alone are all over the map, spooky and turbulent and bleak in equal measures, in answer to so many mandated bright, blasting musical ventures elsewhere in the Soviet cultural regime. The works continue until 1967, with a twisty waltz from Sofia Perovskaya, which seems more like a distant comment on the notion of a dance piece than music scripted for dance. For its mix of big, lit sweeps and minute, shadowy motions, this is one of the best single-CD Shostakovich sets--themed or not--in print. --Andrew Bartlett | 
