Shostakovich's 24 Preludes and Fugues: a mighty piano cycle written by the Russian composer in homage to JS Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. It's abstract, strange, beautiful, unforgiving music. Its complex web of contrapuntal lines has to be spun seamlessly, and light allowed to shine between the individual strands. Not so many pianists take on that challenge, and not all that do manage to pull it off.
But these Preludes and Fugues have become a calling card for the Russian pianist Alexander Melnikov, who has performed them around the world. He recorded them for the record label Harmonia Mundi; that recording was named one of the 50 Greatest Recordings of All Time by BBC Music Magazine in January 2012. His performance of the second half of the set at the Wigmore Hall last Tuesday was an occasion to remember.
I was reminded of the darkness of Schubert, the mercurial nature of Prokofiev, the earthy-peasant moments in Musorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibtion; all this character and more distilled into the miniature world of the Preludes and woven into the strict – and Shostakovich was very strict about it – form of the fugue. Like a spiderweb, a fugue starts with a single thread, and is built up layer by layer. As its architecture grows, so do its beauty and strength. Until, somehow, it becomes more than the sum of its parts.
Listen to Alexander Melnikov's Shostakovich recording here:
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