Although best known for his 15 symphonies and 15 string quartets, Shostakovich actually began his compositional career as a composer for the theater. Before he was 30, he had composed two full-length operas, three full-length ballets, incidental music for seven plays, and eight film scores. All this ended in 1936 when his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and his ballet The Limpid Stream were denounced on the front page of Pravda. From that time onward, Shostakovich completed an opera for a student who died in the War, wrote the first act of an opera he never completed, and allowed several ballets to be compiled and arranged from his pre-existing music but he never again wrote a work for the theater.

Except, that is, for Moskva, Cheremushki—a relentlessly cheerful three-act musical comedy with a satirical edge, set in a real apartment complex south of Moscow. A mixture of song, dance, and spectacle, Moskva, Cheremushki included pop songs, folk songs, massed songs, social realism, social satire, and romance; in form it resembled the operettas of Offenbach, Lehár, and Kalman, the Hollywood film musicals of the 1930s and 1940s, and Broadway musicals of all time, and in Shostakovich's hands it holds together astonishingly well as a piece of popular art.

The plot, such as it is, concerns the inhabitants of the Cheremushki apartment complex and their successful attempt to thwart a plan by the complex's general manager to evict them. But the plot is merely a frame upon which Shostakovich hung his delightful music. Number after number features attractive and instantly memorable melodies set to exhilarating orchestrations. Shostakovich's music balances the sentimental requirements of the form with the satirical requirements of his own conscious. The result is a work which reveals that, had he wanted to, Shostakovich could have written some of the best Broadway musicals of the time.

Some sections of Moskva, Cheremushki are scattered among the "Ballet Suites" prepared from various Shostakovich scores by Lev Avtomian. In addition, British composer Andrew Cornall made a different suite, drawing only on the musical, with the approval of Shostakovich's widow.

© James Leonard, All Music Guide