Soviet Russian works falling under the rubric of Socialist Realism lay fallow for many years as audiences naturally found them less interesting than music that seemed to suggest incipient freedoms. They've enjoyed a modest revival, however, partly because of the insight they offer into the personalities of their composers and their responses to the growing Stalinist menace. This Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution was written in 1936 and is nearly contemporaneous with Peter and the Wolf. Despite taking Marx (including "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it," from the Theses on Feuerbach), Lenin, and Stalin for texts and setting them with a good deal of undeniably enjoyable bombast, the music was still too forward-looking for Stalin's apparatchiks, and the work was not performed until 1966. It's not known exactly what they objected to; possibly the three orchestral interludes, much closer to the mainstream of Prokofiev's style, set them off. These are interesting in both content and placement, and you might sample the ninth track, labeled a "Symphony," to get an idea and also to encounter the strong performances by the Staatskapelle Weimar and Ernst Senff Chor Berlin under Kirill Karabits. Is there an X factor coming from having performances by former East Germans under a Ukrainian? Probably, and you get the blood and thunder in the revolutionary passages from members of the Luftwaffenmusikkorps Erfurt as well.
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