Shostakovich - The Preludes & Fugues

Alexander Melnikov

Harmonia Mundi HMC902019/20 Buy now

Shostakovich
Preludes and Fugues, Op 87
Alexander Melnikov pf
Harmonia Mundi HMC90 2019/20 (151’ • DDD)
DVD includes interview with Alexander Melnikov and Andreas Staier

A superlative survey of Shostakovich’s response to the banality of Soviet life

The origins of Shostakovich’s crowning masterpiece for the piano lay in his 1950 visit to Leipzig as a jury member of their Bach Competition. There he heard his compatriot Tatiana Nikolaieva, who inspired him to write his own Preludes and Fugues, music he completed, working at fever pitch, in two and a half months (roughly one Prelude and Fugue a day). This later became a talisman for Nikolaieva, an artist indelibly associated with the cycle. Yet even she, most generous and warm-hearted of artists, would surely have been the first to salute Alexander Melnikov’s superlative achievement. Few pianists have shown themselves so sensitive to music which is the response of a complex visionary to the corrosive banality of Soviet life at the time. Here the ghosts of the past mingle with an original voice to form a work of unlimited grandeur and variety. Whether terse, playful, enigmatic or profoundly expressive, the Preludes and Fugues are a testimony to Shostakovich’s strength in the face of endlessly depressing and undermining circumstances.

Melnikov, who has written his own brilliantly informed notes and who offers a moving interview on an accompanying DVD, responds to all this with an impeccable all-Russian mastery and with a poetic commitment few could equal. Hear him in the delightfully piquant Fifth Prelude, its melody set against thrumming “guitar strokes”, or in the Sixth Fugue where so much is said in a distant murmur, and you are clearly listening to a master pianist. He achieves a marvel of imaginative delicacy in the Seventh Prelude and Fugue where one carillon of bells replies to another, and he is acutely aware of the whimsy behind the dialogue of growling bass and piping treble in No 9. He is more characterful than Richter in the galumphing Fifteenth Prelude with its crazy-paving fugue and his virtuosity in the moto perpetuo whirl of No 21 is astonishing. In short, whether Shostakovich’s utterance is fiercely driven or mystical and remote, Melnikov’s poise in this finely recorded album is unfaltering.

Bryce Morrison