Listen No. 10 - Slaughter on 10th Avenue

Genre:  Classical

Context:  An album of ballet music

Notable facts:  Slaughter on Tenth Avenue is a ballet first performed within  the 1936 musical On Your Toes in 1936. My research took me to the TimesMachine (the digital archive of the New York Times) where I found the original review of On Your Toes. More of that shortly, but it’s worth mentioning that Richard Green, who inspired this musical blog, was born in  June 1936. 

My favourite track: Slaughter itself, plus Three Dances from Fancy Free (Leonard Bernstein. In fact,  everything on this album is engaging. I didn’t know that Shostakovich wrote the score to a ballet -The Golden Age - in which a Soviet football team visits capitalist Western Europe, has a few adventures, but eventually returns home, Communist values intact.

What critics made of it: There are too many pieces to write about here, and the only review I could find focussed on the recording quality (superlative, apparently) of Living Stereo versions of the record (mine isn’t one of these, sadly). It’s an interesting post:

On Your Toes was well-received, partly because it was innovative - the first musical to include a separate ballet score (Slaughter). A 1936 reviewer wrote ‘The lines are capital. The allusions are literate. For complete enjoyment of 'On Your Toes' ' it is recommended that you brush up on your Beethoven and Rimsky-Korsakoff…’ But later revivals of the show were unevenly received - dated, was the view of some, with the ballet adding nothing to the story. This may be unfair- Slaughter is regularly performed separately, and is often referred to as ‘the killer ballet that changed Broadway.” (Playbill).

Listening to this inspired me to: listen to more ballet music.