Twelve Preludes Op 34 (1933)

arranged for violin and piano by Lera Auerbach (b 1973)

No.4 in E minor: Moderato

No.7 in A major: Andante

No 14 in E flat minor: Adagio

No.23 in F major: Moderato

No.9 in E major: Presto

A similar intrusion, though not so violent, at a similar point in No.4, a three-part fugue, heightens rather than devalues its linear and textural beauty.

a much better one when it introduces and sustains the expressive melody of No.7.

Prelude No 14 in E flat minor, an unexpectedly passionate funeral lament, stands apart from the rest and is a welcome haven of seriousness

No.23 is a strange inspiration, ingeniously accommodating a firmly articulated melody in octaves between the triplet figuration in the right hand and the sustained harmonies low in the left.   

In No.9, however, they are both tested by the breathless activity of a wild tarantella.

In the early stages of his career Shostakovich was as ambitious as a pianist as he was as a composer. In spite of precocious international success with his First Symphony in 1926, he devoted at least as much time in his early twenties to performance as he did to composition, winning a Certificate of Merit in the first International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 1927 and undertaking concert tours to various parts of the Soviet Union. He did, however, contrive to combine the two interests by enlarging his recital repertoire with his own compositions, like the First Piano Sonata Op 12 and the Aphorisms Op 13. His next two piano works, the Twenty-Four Preludes Op 34 and the First Concerto Op 35, both date from 1933 when he was drawn back to the concert platform after an extended period of work on the score of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.

Completed in just over two months – sometimes at the rate of one a day –Shostakovich’s Twenty-Four Preludes are obviously a more systematic collection than Rachmaninov’s, which were written over a period of nine years. In fact, they are much closer to Chopin’s Op 28 and Scriabin’s Op 11 both in their tonal organisation (following a cycle of fifths through all the keys from C major and A minor to F major and D minor) and in their brevity. At the same time they are not so highly charged in subjective emotion as any of the comparable sets. While they are less overtly satirical than the Aphorisms, among the other sentiments so elusively touched on here there is more than a hint of irony - as in the combination of an Alberti bass and a Chopinesque chromatic line at the beginning of Prelude No 1. But there is a lyrical element here too as there is, after the brilliant little dance of No 2, in the nocturnal musings of No 3.

For the most part Shostakovich avoids ternary structures, allowing each piece to develop in its own way and even to embrace the apparently irrelevant like the suddenly violent rhythmic tattoo towards the end of No 3. There is, however, a certain amount of recapitulation in the delicately scored romance of No 10 while Nos 12 and 13, a toccata and a rustic bourrée, are comparatively consistent in figuration and clearly defined in character. Prelude No 14 in E flat minor, an unexpectedly passionate funeral lament, stands apart from the rest and is a welcome haven of seriousness before the quick waltz of No 15, the march of No 16 and the slow waltz -mazurka of No.17. The last Prelude in the set begins like a Prokofiev neo-classical gavotte but includes, in its rolling left-hand arpeggios, a timely reminder of Chopin before the end.