Whilst Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony depicted a dramatic, victorious struggle against fate, he contrasted this with his “Pastoral” Symphony, an ode to nature in all its beauty. Shostakovich had ended his Fifth Symphony on a triumphalist note, against a background of Stalinist oppression. His Sixth has a sombre, tragic beginning, but its contrasting finale ends with a boisterous galop1 that would not seem out of place in the Moscow Circus.
Dmitri Kabalevsky was a contemporary of Shostakovich, and this rollicking opera overture is one of his best-known works.
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1galop A fast and lively ballroom dance in 2/4 time which became popular in Paris and Vienna in the 1820’s. It derived from an earlier German dance, the Hopser, and was popular in England in the mid-Victorian era, either as an individual dance or as a quadrille movement