Folk Dances

Shostakovich’s original was the third movement of his 1942 suite of incidental music for a musical revue called The Motherland, also known as My Native Leningrad or Otchizna, his opus 63. The suite, written during the bleakest days of World War II, was often somber, ending with a hymn to Leningrad for orchestra and choir. The source material of Folk Dances was the “Dance of Youth,” a purely instrumental movement intended, it seems, to lighten the suite. It includes several Russian folk melodies strung together one after the other as it accelerates to a big finish. It is worth noting that the revue was originally performed by the Song and Dance Ensemble of the NKVD, the Soviet Union’s feared secret police that later became the KGB.