Dmitri SHOSTAKOVICH (1906–1975)
Complete Piano Works - Volume 1
Aphorisms, Op. 13 (1927) [11:55]
8 Preludes, Op. 2 (1919–1920) [8:28]
Three Fantastic Dances, Op. 5 (1920/1922) [3:37]
Funeral March in Memory of the Victims of the Revolution (1917) [1:12]
Nostalgia (1919) [2:20]
Prelude-March (1919) [2:08]
Piano Piece in C (1919) [3:39]
In the Forest (1919) [1:49]
Bagatelle (1919) [1:10]
Minuet, Prelude, and Intermezzo (unfinished) (1917 or 1919–1920) [2:13]
24 Preludes, Op. 34 (1932–1933) [28:15]
Eugenio Catone (piano)
rec. December 2020; Splash Recording Studio, Naples, Italy
STRADIVARIUS STR37201 [69:30]
With his cowlick and bubble glasses, the young Shostakovich looked the living stereotype of precociously talented child and diligent student, an image which reflected and belied the galvanizing (and sometimes unsettling) friction of ambiguity that crackles within his music. A traditionalist who embraced classical forms, he also single-handedly upended Russian music’s longstanding Francophilia; a charismatic and formidable, if highly idiosyncratic pianist, he not only spurned his expected destiny as globetrotting composer-virtuoso, but even mostly neglected the piano in his creative art. In the quarter-century spanning the composition of the Symphony No. 1 and the 24 Preludes and Fugues, he bestowed opus numbers upon exactly six works for his instrument (of which only three are performed regularly). Nothing else followed in the last quarter-century of his life (a minor collaborative work that commemorated the centennial of Mikhail Glinka’s death notwithstanding). In Shostakovich’s youth, however, the piano had been a playground for his creativity, as well as a laboratory where he could experiment and forge the unique idiom that soon would startle the world.
This newest release from Stradivarius, the first volume in a projected integral series of Shostakovich’s piano music, presents for the first time on CD fascinating snapshots of the future master composer still in school uniform. The Piano Piece in C, for example, is redolent of Schumann’s linden tree, while the initially turgid In the Forest takes a sudden left turn into pastiche verging unto soundalike of Ignaz Friedman’s Tabatière à musique (even shamelessly lifting the latter’s distinctive upward licks); the earliest work presented here, the brief Funeral March in Memory of the Victims of the Revolution–Shostakovich’s musical “Rosebud”–established early on his tantalizing juxtapositions of the personal and external which would subsequently preoccupy him (not to mention his posthumously acquired Millenial nerdcore fanbase, who has fashioned the man, his historical background, and resultant struggles into toyetic, theme park-ified, comic book travesties which they, wrongheadedly, aspire to cosplay as).
Far more rewarding are those scores in which Shostakovich the mature artist can be heard emerging. That this juvenilia, most of it predating his enrollment at the Petrograd Conservatory, has managed to survive Russia’s turbulent 20th century at all was thanks to a minor miracle effected by the venerable Alexandra Rozanova, a cultured woman and pianist whose own penchant for all things Gallic may have imprinted momentarily on her one-time student. In the Eight Preludes, Op. 2 (formerly known as the “Five Preludes” until the recent publication of the remaining three), the most fascinating of these early works, one hears Scriabin and Rachmaninoff jostle improbably and incongruously with Fauré (try the fourth prelude, with its reminiscences of the French composer’s Impromptu No. 3), all soon to be jettisoned and rebuked (at least in private) by the adult Shostakovich. Their fragile romanticism is unlike anything else in his work, although characteristic touches (e.g. the gentle fake-out before the close of the fourth prelude or the chuckling “recitativo” interrupting the enraptured “amoroso” flights in the seventh prelude) already point the way forward to the path that would lead not to the astringent (and underrated) Aphorisms which opens this disc, but to the 24 Preludes of 1933 which closes it.
The former work, composed at the height of Shostakovich’s eyeblink-brief modernist phase during 1927–1928, is the closest the former goody-two-shoes came to giving the establishment, musical and political, a well-deserved bras d'honneur. The genre of Romantic “character pieces” comes under the composer’s learned assault, each one a masterly display of erudition and subversion. By the time of the 24 Preludes, composed only six years later, the composer’s art had already been buffeted by the haranguing of RAPM agitators demanding gebrauchsmusik mediocrity. The mood is pervasively listless, unfocused; striving for the brittle wit enfolding moments of unexpected pathos successfully realized in the slightly later Piano Concerto No. 1.
Pianist Eugenio Catone’s performance of Aphorisms is, arguably, the best on records yet of this pianistic stepchild; demonstrating a sympathy and understanding for its acerbic idiom rarely heard elsewhere. His performance of the 24 Preludes is also very fine, managing to wrest more from its threadbare components than the throwaway quasi-improvisations typically heard. Catone’s superb playing, abetted here by his sound engineers and the excellent acoustic of the Splash Recording Studio in Naples, makes this disc a rewarding listen and more than just an interesting curiosity for Shostakovich diehards.
Néstor Castiglione
