Shostakovich: Piano Concertos

Shostakovich’s music is often 'two-faced', sometimes sublimated in ecstasy and joie de vivre, sometimes plunged into emptiness and suffused with a death wish. Accompanied by the Mahler Chamber Orchestra under the direction of Teodor Currentzis, Alexander Melnikov captures this feeling admirably in the Concertos Opp.35 and 102, and perhaps still more poignantly – “with disarming sincerity and fearless directness”, to quote his booklet note – alongside Isabelle Faust in the Sonata Op.134.

“The coupling of the Second Piano Concerto and the Violin Sonata on this CD is by no means accidental. In terms of musical language the two pieces stand so far apart that it is difficult to comprehend how the same composer could have written them both. It is true that from its inception the sonata bore the stamp of ‘inaccessibility’, supposedly impossible for a listener to digest, and has never quite achieved the popularity of its counterparts for cello and viola. This music is as far from ‘easy listening’ as it gets. On the other hand the second movement of the Second Concerto is routinely included in ‘light classics’ compilations, broadcast by radio stations and played through headphones to airline passengers or CAT patients to ‘make them feel good’.” Alexander Melnikov

• 
  Gramophone Awards

  2012

  Finalist - Concerto
• 
  Gramophone Magazine

  May 2012

  Editor's Choice
• 
  BBC Music Magazine

  April 2012

  Orchestral Choice

   

  April 2012

  his lightning switches of tempo and mood in the fast movement outdo most competitors for bizarrerie...Melnikov includes a searing, thrilling account of Shostakovich's late Violin Sonata, Op. 134, in which he partners the very impressive Isabelle Faust...Unhesitatingly recommended as one of the best versions of all three works currently available.

  5 out of 5 stars

  2nd September 2012

  I’ve never found Melnikov’s tone so pearly, and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra’s strings have a discipline and suavity that are second to none. If you want Romanticism with a big R in the slow movements and plenty of fixed manic grins and wild funhouse careening elsewhere, this is as good as it gets.

  May 2012

  The hide-and-seek games between piano and orchestra in the first movement are delectable enough. But then the slow movement...to call this breathtaking would be an understatement. Starting at a whisper, Melnikov fines his sound down to the threshold of audibility and extends phrase-endings until the world seems to stand still...For me, this is Shostakovich-playing on a level of inspiration I have only heard in my dreams.

   

  9th February 2012

  He makes his case well. The First Concerto is all rampaging dissonances and erotic regret; the Second (1957) masks nerve-racking syncopations beneath its surface brilliance...[the sonata] a compelling performance in which logic and rhetoric combine with tremendous intensity.

  5 out of 5 stars

  The Arts Desk25th February 2012

  Here, Shostakovich’s 12-note melodies take on a peculiar, tonal cast, and the work’s emotional trajectory is made utterly absorbing...Melnikov’s approach to the Concerto no 1 makes the work a breezier, more optimistic affair than usual. He’s right – despite the minor-key histrionics, this is a youthful, confident display piece, composed before the repression of the Stalin years.