Programme Details
Emanuil Ivanov, winner of the 2019 Ferruccio Busoni Competition, performs Shostakovich’s majestic cycle of Preludes and Fugues: a deeply personal journey that is playful, tragic and triumphant.
In 1950 Shostakovich was sent by his government as the head of a Soviet delegation to East Germany to celebrate the the bicentenary of the death of Johann Sebastian Bach. One of the events was the famous piano competition in Leipzig, where Shostakovich (rather reluctantly) sat on the jury. 26-year-old Tatyana Nikolayeva’s playing of the Well-Tempered Clavier so impressed Shostakovich that he immediately decided to create something as monumental for her.
Bach’s two books of preludes and fugues proceeds up the steps of the chromatic scale alternating major and minor keys starting with C major. Shostakovich moves through a circle of fifths, like Chopin’s Op.28 Preludes: C major and its relative A minor, then adding one sharp for G major/E minor. The flat keys take over in reverse order, decreasing in number down to one: F major/D minor – where the cycle ends.
First performed by Tatyana Nikolayeva in December 1951, she wrote: ‘it is music of great depth, of unsurpassed mastery and greatness. They are 24 masterpieces, each with its own internal world. …The breadth of images and characterizations is very great: from tragedy to humour, from gaiety to the grotesque.’
SHOSTAKOVICH Book I
No 1 C major
No 2 A minor
No 3 G major
No 4 E minor
No 5 D major
No 6 B minor
No 7 A major
No 8 F sharp minor
No 9 E major
No 10 C sharp minor
No 11 B flat major
No 12 G sharp minor
SHOSTAKOVICH Book II
No 13 F sharp major
No 14 E flat minor
No 15 D flat major
No 16 B flat minor
No 17 A flat major
No 18 F minor
No 19 E flat major
No 20 C minor
No 21 B flat major
No 22 G minor
No 23 F major
No 24 D minor
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