Shostakovich: Preludes & Fugues Op 87 album review – Avdeeva brings a light touch in an accomplished performance | Classical music

Shostakovich composed his 24 Preludes and Fugues in 1950 and 1951, between his Ninth and Tenth Symphonies. As a judge in the first International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition in Leipzig in 1950, he had been hugely impressed by the playing of the Soviet pianist Tatiana Nikolayeva in The Well-Tempered Clavier. On his return to Moscow he began composing a series of preludes and fugues for Nikolayeva, consciously modelling them on Bach, though ordering them according to the circle of fifths rather than chromatically as Bach does, and larding them with references not only to his model but to his own works. He completed the set in all the major and minor keys the following year and Nikolayeva gave the premiere in Leningrad in 1952. She went on to make no less than four recordings of it, including one for Hyperion in 1990 that has become the benchmark version.

Comparing Nikolayeva’s performances with those by Yulianna Avdeeva on her new set is fascinating. Avdeeva, who won the International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 2010, takes a lighter approach, less forthright, and perhaps not digging as deeply into the barely disguised tragedy of the E minor Prelude as Nikolayeva does, but equally dazzling in the exuberant display of the A minor. She finds exactly the right mood of delicate insouciance for the F sharp minor prelude, too, and for the mysterious halting fugue that follows.

Avdeeva follows her performance of the set with a recording of a prelude in C sharp minor that Shostakovich originally drafted for his Op 87 set, but discarded unfinished; the Polish composer Krzysztof Meyer completed the draft and added a fugue of his own. She gave the world premiere of the complete work in 2020, and it makes a neat envoi to a very accomplished performance.

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