Where Have I Heard This?

Track fourteen was a minuet for a graduation, a piece made for one afternoon and kept by accident. Track fifteen is a waltz. It has the opposite problem: everybody knows it, and almost nobody knows where it came from.

The facts first. Track fifteen runs three minutes and thirty-six seconds. It is the seventh movement of Shostakovich’s Suite for Variety Orchestra, Waltz No. 2. The credit is the same as track fourteen: Arr. Garrett / Haywood for Violin, Piano, Guitar & Orchestra, with Julien Quentin, Franck van der Heijden, Orchestra the Prezent and John Haywood conducting.

Garrett explains the choice in his Track by Track clip, and he doesn’t dress it up:

“I decided to take a piece from Dmitri Shostakovich, which is extremely famous. It’s one of those pieces where I want the audience, when I perform the program live, even if they don’t know classical music, to have recognition of something they might have heard somewhere, in a movie or in a commercial.”

Most likely in 1999, somewhere in Stanley Kubrick’s New York, with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Eyes Wide Shut opens with this waltz. The recording is Riccardo Chailly’s, with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, made in 1991.

Or in 2016, at a gala in Batman v Superman, where Bruce Wayne corners Diana Prince among the guests. Same waltz, same orchestra, same Chailly recording.

Or in the Netherlands in 1994, where André Rieu released it as a single. It reached number five in the Dutch Mega Top 50 and sold more than fifty thousand copies.

Or in an advert. Garrett says so himself, and he is right.

Or in Anna Karenina, the 1997 film with Sophie Marceau. Except it isn’t there. The soundtrack is Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev. Fans have laid the waltz over its ballroom scenes so many times that half the internet now remembers hearing it in the film.

The waltz was written for a film, just not any of those. The First Echelon is a Soviet romance from 1956, directed by Mikhail Kalatozov, who would make The Cranes Are Flying a year later. Young volunteers go out to plough the virgin steppe of Kazakhstan.

His publisher’s catalogue of his works says the waltz was not used in the film. It survived because the music from the score was gathered into a concert suite in 1956, where it is the eighth number, Waltz.

Shostakovich wrote music for almost forty films. This was one of them, and outside Russia, hardly anyone has seen it.

After 1956, Shostakovich’s friend Levon Atovmyan compiled and arranged pieces from his film, theatre and ballet scores into a suite of eight numbers for a variety orchestra, with saxophones, accordion and guitar. Our waltz is the second waltz in it, the seventh movement. No manuscript of the suite exists in Shostakovich’s hand.

In 1984, volume ten of the Soviet collected edition printed a footnote calling the suite something else entirely, the name of a lost 1938 work:

Jazz Suite No. 2.

The editor-in-chief had added the footnote without telling his own staff. When the editor of the volume phoned him to object, he hung up.

The name stuck. The suite’s first documented performance, at the Barbican in London in 1988 with Mstislav Rostropovich conducting, went out under it. One critic called the music “tripe”. Chailly recorded it under that name too, and that is the recording Kubrick used.

The score was not printed under its right name until 2001. You will still find “Jazz Suite No. 2” on streaming services today.

The arrangement has a guitar, and here it belongs. Shostakovich’s score for The First Echelon has two guitars, two mandolins and a bayan. The Suite for Variety Orchestra gives the guitar a place in its band, next to the accordion, the saxophones, two pianos and a celesta. Franck van der Heijden is playing an instrument this waltz has kept company with for decades.

This is new repertoire for Garrett on record. His only earlier Shostakovich album recording is the Praeludium for two violins and piano, with Itzhak Perlman.

We have heard him play Shostakovich twice. In Saanen, on Menuhin’s Stradivari, opposite Daniel Hope on the Lipinski del Gesù, he played the Waltz from Shostakovich’s Five Pieces for two violins, with no “against” anywhere in it (Masters of Sound). Atovmyan arranged those too. And with his father, Georg Bongartz, he played the Prelude for two violins (Family Matters).

This series keeps asking what carries music past the people who made it.

Track fourteen said that immortality keeps what nobody thought to keep safe. Track fifteen is the loud version of the same answer. A waltz left out of a film that hardly anyone saw, arranged by a friend, filed under the wrong name, picked up by a waltz king and two film directors.

So the next time it starts up in your head, listen to track fifteen as Garrett meant it: the piece you know without knowing why.

Immortal — David Garrett for Deutsche Grammophon — arrives 9 October 2026: 20 tracks in the standard edition, 25 in the deluxe, on digital, CD and vinyl, with pre-orders open now on Deutsche Grammophon. One track at a time, we keep counting the album in.

Sources & notes: the album credit as printed by Deutsche Grammophon (5 October 2026) and david-garrett.com; Garrett’s words from his Track by Track clip for Deutsche Grammophon; the film, its scoring and the waltz’s fate from Gerard McBurney’s Shostakovich work list (Boosey & Hawkes, 2023); the suite, Atovmyan, the 1984 footnote, the 2001 edition, the 1988 premiere and review, Chailly’s recording and Rieu’s single from the reference literature on the Suite for Variety Orchestra (Yakubov, Hulme, McBurney); the film uses from the published soundtracks of Eyes Wide Shut and Batman v Superman; Garrett’s Shostakovich repertoire from david-garrett.com; Gstaad and Family Matters from our own coverage. Some sources say the waltz is heard in The First Echelon; we follow McBurney’s catalogue. We checked Anna Karenina (1997) and found no Shostakovich in it.