The news here is not the fine performance of
Dmitri Shostakovich's 1933 set of 24 Preludes for piano, Op. 34, although on those grounds alone the album would be worth the purchase price. Pianist
Jascha Nemtsov offers lively readings of these preludes with a fine feel for the quintessentially Russian sarcasm that creeps into many of them and delightfully jousts with their neo-Romantic formality.
Nemtsov comes from the same Siberian region where Vsevolod Zaderatsky, born in 1891, was exiled for much of his life, and he has championed this little-known composer's music. Zaderatsky's exile came about even before the major wave of Stalinist repression, likely because he had the bad luck to have been a music teacher for the family of the Czar and specifically for Tsarevich Alexei, the heir to the throne until the murder of the entire ruling family in 1918. These preldues were composed in 1934, about a year after
Shostakovich's set. Zaderatsky had been allowed to return to Moscow at the time and would certainly have been in a position to hear
Shostakovich's preludes, but it is not known whether he did. In any event, they are not in the
Shostakovich line, and they make an interesting enough contrast with their more famous counterparts to hold the listener's attention through an entire album of 48 preludes. Much more than
Shostakovich, Zaderatsky takes
Chopin as a model. His preludes are highly pianistic, tending toward the use of extremes of the keyboard. They lack the modern and sometimes satirical edge that surfaces in the
Shostakovich pieces, but they can't really be called conservative, either; the wide musical spaces are filled in with an interesting variety of harmonies that sometimes suggest an acquaintance with Scriabin, and the variety of the set as a whole makes a strong impression. With the usual top-notch engineering from Germany's Profil label in place, this is a release that has the potential to reshape the piano repertory.