In the last few days, we've had a bunch of hits from people looking for Shostakovich's Tahiti Trot. Given Shostakovich's later output of complex, challenging and sometimes disturbed music, this has to rate as one of his more improbable pieces, being based around an orchestration of "Tea for Two". The piece is thoroughly tongue in cheek and a lot of fun, which makes sense when you look up the Wikipedia article and discover that it was written in order to win a 100 rouble bet that Shostakovich couldn't orchestrate the tune from memory in under an hour. He won the bet, with fifteen minutes to spare. One wonders what Stalin must have made of the piece, which falls firmly into the "Decadent bourgeois capitalist un-Russian" category.
For the curious, here's a clip...
...and a CD version, which includes Shostakovich's more substantial and very wonderful Jazz Suites:
