Composer: Dmitri Shostakovich
Performer: Vladimir Ashkenazy, Zsolt-Tihamér Visontay, Mats Lidström, Ada Meinich
Format: FLAC (tracks)
Label: Decca
Catalogue: 4789382
Release: 2016
Size: 1.19 GB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: yes
01. Piano Trio No. 1 in C minor, Op. 8
Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, Op. 67
02. 1. Andante – Moderato – Poco più mosso
03. 2. Allegro con brio
04. 3. Largo
05. 4. Allegretto – Adagio
Viola Sonata, Op. 147
06. 1. Moderato
07. 2. Allegretto
08. 3. Adagio
As a young man in Moscow in the early 1960s Vladimir Ashkenazy was invited by Shostakovich to play a private performance of the Piano Trio No 2 in the composer’s apartment.
Ashkenazy’s friendship with the composer and his lifelong advocacy of his music as a pianist and conductor lends the performances on this album a unique, definitive authority and he is joined by long-standing chamber music partners. Astonishingly, these are Ashkenazy’s first recordings of this music and add to a remarkable Shostakovich discography on Decca.
The three works on this album span Shostakovich’s entire creative life: from the early, rarely heard Trio No 1 – an almost uncharacteristically romantic piece written when he was 16 – to his very last composition, the Viola Sonata of 1975. In between comes the masterpiece which was born of national and personal tragedy in Leningrad in 1944: the Piano Trio No 2.
In the Trios Ashkenazy is reunited with the team he recorded Rachmaninov with: “Ashkenazy, Visontay and Lidström tap the vein of grief coursing through this music…They also unleash passion” (Daily Telegraph). And for the viola sonata, Ashkenazy is joined by the distinguished Norwegian violist Ada Meinich, until recently a member of the Faust Quartet.
This very fine recording of chamber music by Shostakovich spans careers, not only that of the composer, but also that of 79-year-old pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy, who played the Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, Op. 67, for Shostakovich at his home as a young man, but hasn’t recorded it until now. There are other strong recordings of this tragic wartime work, which merges the personal and the external in a way that only Shostakovich and Beethoven could do, but sample the heavy, monumental treatment of the slow movement Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, Op. 67, and you’ll find it’s Ashkenazy through and through. The program includes the rarely heard Piano Trio No. 1 in C minor, Op. 8, a hotshot bit of formally ingenious, student, late Romanticism that the aging pianist catches perfectly, and the late Viola Sonata, Op. 147, a work that can collapse under its own weight, but that here is charismatic and transcendent. The other players, none of them Russian, adapt with a sure touch to piano-driven performances. A wonderful tribute from one great artist to another who inspired him, beautifully recorded.