Last night, I got on a Shostakovich kick. I always forget how much I love his compositions when I've not listened to them for a while. There's such humor and warmth there (or at least that's what I get from a lot of them).

This piece is an arrangement of a well-known tune (In Russia, it's apparently better known as "Tahiti Trot," which is, I think, Shostakovich's renaming of it). This was the outcome of a bet: a conductor who had worked with Shostakovich bet him 100 rubles that he could not (a) arrange the piece from memory, having heard a recording of it and (b) do so in under an hour.

Shostakovich won the bet handily, and we have this lovely confection as a result:



Shostakovich, at least in the earlier photos of him I've seen, was also quite cute in that studious/rumpled way that I like. I suppose it's partly the glasses that do it.