Catone’s “Complete” Shostakovich: Volume 2

courtesy of Naxos of America

At the beginning of this year, I wrote about the launch of a project to record a more thorough account of Dmitri Shostakovich’s compositions for solo piano. The recordings are being made by Italian pianist Eugenio Catone and released by Stradivarius. When I learn about a project like this, I tend to assume that the individual albums will be released at a snail’s pace. Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the second volume will be released this coming Friday and that, as expected, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders. The not-so-good news is that, as of this writing, the album will distributed only for digital download; and I have yet to encounter any specific information about a “physical” release.

Readers may recall that there were only two instances of content not previously recorded in the first volume. The more significant of these is the addition of three preludes to the Opus 2 collection. The other consisted of nine tracks of juvenilia composed between 1918 and 1920.

Where the second volume is concerned, it turns out that the “new content” has nothing to do with Shostakovich. The two piano sonatas, Opus 12 and Opus 61, remain as they have always been. The same can be said of the seven pieces in the Opus 69 Children’s Notebook. The only difference is that the new release accounts for all eleven of the “Variations on a Theme by Glinka,” composed in 1957. This was a “collective” project for which Shostakovich provided only three variations, the eighth, the ninth, and the eleventh. The remaining variations were composed by Eugen Kapp, Vissarion Shebalin, Andrei Eshpai, Rodion Shchedrin, Gregory Sviridov, and Dmitri Kabalevsky; and they have all been recorded by Catone.

I am not sure how advantageous it was to include this in a complete-works project for Shostakovich. On the other hand, after having poked around both Amazon and Google, I found myself wondering if the complete set had ever been previously recorded (particularly since this music has nothing to do with the Glinka variations composed by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov). The project took place in 1957, which was a relatively good time for artistic innovation as the innovators became less fearful of Joseph Stalin’s ghost. The fact is that all the contributors seemed to have had fun with this project at a time when “fun” was only gradually returning to their working vocabulary. At the very least, this “complete” set of variations provides the attentive listener with some sense of the company that Shostakovich was keeping at that time.