SHOSTAKOVICH: The Gamblers (Brilliant Opera Collection) [CD de audio] Nicolai Kurpe, Piotr Gluboky, Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra, S

The Russian composer Dmitri Dmitrijewitsch Shostakovich left us two operas: The Nose after Gogol and Lady Macbeth of Mzensk, as well as the operetta Moscow Cheryemusski. After his death, numerous drafts, sketches and unfinished torsos of opera themes were discovered. The opera fragment The Players was also among them. Legendary Russian conductor Gennadi Roschdestwenski secured a completion and playable notation for the orchestra of the stirring piece, which can be described as the most compositionally substantial of Shostakovich's legacies. The card players are said to symbolize the then rulers Richard Chamberlain, Joseph Stalin and Benito Mussolini as musically exaggerated and at the same time exposed actors of political arbitrariness after Hitler's invasion of Russia. Shostakovich adhered to Gogol's text. The work would have led to Shostakovich's immediate internment in the Gulag archipelago during his lifetime. But that didn't happen. Roschdestwenski showed the world the first act he completed in the acclaimed premiere in 1978.