Back in July of 2012, when I was writing for Examiner.com, I wrote about a five-CD collection of the complete piano works of Dmitri Shostakovich recorded by Boris Petrushansky, born in Moscow in 1949 and teaching at the Imola Piano Academy in Italy. What I did not know at that time was that DSCH, the Moscow Publishing House of the Association Internationale Dimitri Chostakovich had launched a New Collected Works publication project in 2000. The entire collection will, when completed, consist of 150 volumes; and volumes 109 through 115 are devoted to the piano compositions. As of this writing, only Volume 112 has yet to be released.
This coming Friday Stradivarius will release the first volume in a new project to record all of Shostakovich’s compositions for solo piano. The recordings were made by Italian pianist Eugenio Catone. It is clear from examining the track listing that Catone was working from the DSCH publications, since there are a generous number of tracks that one will not find on the Petrushansky recordings. It is also worth noting that Amazon.com now lists that Petrushansky collection as “Currently unavailable.” More importantly, Amazon.com has created the Web page for pre-ordering Catone’s first CD.
There are two key differences in content that distinguish Catone’s more comprehensive project. One is the inclusion of nine tracks of juvenilia composed between 1918 and 1920. There is often a tendency to dismiss those first youthful stabs at composition as being hopelessly naive. In this case, however, there is evidence that Shostakovich was already flexing his capacity for prankishness before his teens and before he encountered the risks of rubbing authority the wrong way.
Ironically, that prankishness surfaces in a funeral march. The deceased were two members of the Constitutional Democratic Party, known as Kadets. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, the Kadets consisted of intellectuals and professionals trying to steer their country towards the advantages of a liberal democracy. Shostakovich’s march was written as a memorial for two Kadet leaders that had been murdered by Bolshevik sailors. (The words of Lucy Van Pelt come to mind: “He was beginning to make sense, so I hit him.”)
Whether or not Shostakovich saw the irony in the factionalism that emerged after the overthrow of the monarchy is left for others to decide. However, the composer gave his funeral march an ironic twist by appropriating a fragment of the funeral march that Ludwig van Beethoven had composed for his Opus 26 piano sonata in A-flat major. (The funeral march itself is the third movement in the key of A-flat minor.) While this sonata was dedicated to Karl Alois, Prince Lichnowsky, Beethoven’s thoughts about political authority were probably more consistent with the Kadets than with the Bolsheviks!
The more significant distinction in Catone’s album concerns the Opus 2 collection of preludes. Petrushansky’s recording treats this as a collection of five, but DSCH now lists this as a set of eight, published for the first time in 2018. That updated version is the one on the new Catone album. Sadly, the booklet notes (whose author is not identified), translated into English by Claudia Marchetti, says almost nothing about the emergence of these three additional preludes; and Google is not any more helpful.
However, if the search for background information is frustrating, Catone’s performances are consistently engaging. It would not surprise me if he were the first pianist to record all eight of the Opus 2 preludes, since my Google searches have not (yet) turned up any other recordings (or videos, for that mater). Sadly, the DSCH site does not allow for browsing anything other than tables of contents; so we shall just have to wait until more informative sources choose to write about the discoveries encountered in the contents of the new publications.
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