Shostakovich world premieres! DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906—75) : Symphony No. 14, Op. 135 arranged for soprano, bass, piano and percussion by the composer (World Première Recording), Sonata (unfinished) for violin and piano (1945), Funeral March in Memory of Victims of the Revolution for solo piano, Toska (Nostalgia) for solo piano, In the Forest (from Four Pieces for piano), Bagatelle for solo piano, Fragment from Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No.10 for piano four hands (World Première Recording). Nicolas Stavy, piano and celesta; Ekaterina Bakanova, soprano; Alexandros Stavrakakis, bass; Florent Jodelet, percussion, Sueye Park, violin, Nicolas Stavy & Cédric Tiberghien, piano 4 hands.

Description: Anything that expands our understanding of the 20th century’s greatest composer is self-recommending; there is no such thing as too much Shostakovich! The Fourteenth Symphony is quintessential Shostakovich, its status as one of the peaks of his output perhaps having been overshadowed by its predecessor, and unfairly undermined by its reduced forces and resemblance to a song cycle. The composer attached great importance to the Symphony. In correspondence he inveighed against the portrayal of death in Romantic music as representing a beautiful, redeeming renewal, and intended to reinstate its status as an ugly, terrifying thing to be feared. Taking his cue from Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death, which he had orchestrated in 1962, he produced a haunted, angry, almost nihilistic musical polemic contra death, setting the searing poetry of Apollinaire, the tenebrous, Goya-esque imagery of Lorca, and the tragic, tormented, existential resignation of Rilke. The orchestration of the original version is exceedingly inventive and effective, and this is transferred unscathed into this transcription, in no small part due to the retention of the percussion instruments. The percussion part being a substantial and integral part of the work’s unique soundscape, it can surely only have been incorporated with a view to performance in reduced form, in which it is as successful as the original version of the great Suite on Verses of Michelangelo Buonarroti (Shostakovich’s "Sixteenth Symphony"). Shostakovich started work on a violin sonata in 1945 , shortly before he wrote the 9th Symphony. He abandoned it after completing the substantial exposition heard here, some five minutes of music. The second subject turns up again in the same rôle in the 10th Symphony, so the composer clearly recognised its worth. When the fragment was rediscovered, Schnittke was asked to complete it, but declined, apparently on the grounds that an exposition already so large and varied would require an enormous development to do it justice - which is true - but in itself that seems not to be an entirely convincing reason not to proceed. But trying to compose some 20+ minutes of what Shostakovich might have done with the fertile material he provided would be a daunting task for any composer, and Schnittke likely felt that it was better left alone. The composer-pianist prodigy wrote a number of pieces for piano in his pre-teenage years; these four date from 1917 to 1919. They are astonishingly accomplished, and if we lacked the knowledge that they are the juvenilia of a genius, they could pass as mature trifles by a lesser composer. The first is an imposing funeral march, obviously derived from a certain specimen by Chopin (a favourite of the young Shostakovich, his presence looms large over all these pieces). "Longing" begins as a march, and ends with a section based on a melancholy melody, a precursor to the long-limbed, aching themes of the composer’s maturity. In the Forest, from Four Pieces for piano of 1919, is still more pianistically advanced, with arpeggiated figuration accompanying the melody, and a "music box" central episode that prefigures the many "grotesque" scherzi throughout Shostakovich’s career. The last chosen piece here, Bagatelle (1919), is a fast and virtuosic study in alternating hands, pointing to Shostakovich’s increasing confidence as performer. The connection between Mahler and Shostakovich is well documented; traces of Mahler’s influence are to be found throughout Shostakovich’s output, aside from the obvious references in Lady Macbeth and the Fourth Symphony. In the 1920s and 1930s, Mahler's music was performed and enthusiastically received in Russia, and Mahler Societies sprang up, at which the symphonies were heard and studied in 2-piano, 8-hand versions. Shostakovich probably wrote his 4-hand reduction of Mahler’s 10th in the later 1920s, from the facsimile edition that had been published in 1924, to present the unknown work to one of these societies. Even though the transcription is incomplete - about a third of the movement - it is a tribute to Shostakovich’s extraordinary skill that it represents the music so well. While certainly made for demonstration purposes, the choice of the duet medium allows a more accurate representation of orchestral texture and registration than a solo transcription could; it is instructive to compare this with Ronald Stevenson's masterly concert transcription for solo piano, which makes of its unlikely subject for such treatment a virtuoso work conceived in terms of the piano. Shostakovich, with more scholarly, less performance-oriented aims, represents Mahler’s intentions more accurately in another way. As we observed of the transcriptions of Scriabin’s symphonies by various Russian pianists/composers last year (08Y025) the suitability of piano transcriptions of orchestral works in representing the effect of the original varies widely with the skill of the transcriber, and Shostakovich’s abilities in this regard are revealed to be (unsurprisingly) of the very highest order. Nicolas Stavy, piano and celesta; Ekaterina Bakanova, soprano; Alexandros Stavrakakis, bass; Florent Jodelet, percussion, Sueye Park, violin, Nicolas Stavy & Cédric Tiberghien, piano 4 hands.