Twenty-four Preludes and Fugues, opus 87.
Vladimir Ashkenazy (piano).
Decca 466 066-2. 2 disc set. DDD. TT 62:21 + 79:22.
Recorded Berlin, Winterthur (Stadthaus) and London, May 1996 - April 1998.

In addition to thirteen CDs featuring Vladimir Ashkenazy conducting Shostakovich's music, Decca have issued recordings, all now deleted, in which he has taken part as a pianist in six of the composer's works (Cello Sonata, Moderato for Cello and Piano, Piano Quintet, Blok Romances, Captain Lebyadkin Verses and the piano version of the Michelangelo Suite, this last item issued only on LP but later rerecorded by Ashkenazy in its orchestral version). However, the present release is his first commercial recording of any of the solo piano music.

In 1991 I devoted many pages of the society's newsletter to a discussion of the outstanding recording of the Opus 87 cycle by Marios Papadopoulos (Kingdom KCLCD2023 & 2024/5). Caroline Weichert's set is also impressive (Accord 202032), but the widely-acclaimed Hyperion set by Tatiana Nikolayeva (CDA66441/3) is likely to be most listeners' point of reference in a comparative evaluation of this new Decca release. Nikolayeva first recorded the cycle in 1962, but this 4-LP set has had little circulation outside the USSR. The 1962 performance is a fine one, illustrating why many musicians, including Ashkenazy himself, have paid tribute to her artistry. These LPs have never appeared on CD and the Melodiya CDs currently available of Nikolayeva playing Opus 87 derive from a 1987 recording which shows a distressing deterioration in her playing (19849-2) [Recordings Editor's note: since this review was written, the BMG/Melodiya release has become unavailable, but the same recording has been reissued on Regis RRC 3005]. The 1987 set did not become available in the West until after Nikolayeva had recorded the cycle again in 1990 for Hyperion, a performance which shows an even greater decline, and a set which it would certainly not have been thought necessary to make had the better-engineered 1987 version been available at that time.

There is probably no parallel in the history of recording for any artist changing their interpretation as drastically as did Nikolayeva between her 1962 and 1990 recordings; indeed, it is difficult to conceive that the two sets are the work of the same artist. Reviewing the Hyperion set in 1991, I was as gullible as all other writers (with the exception of Ian MacDonald) in assuming the 1990 performance to be "authentic", a long-delayed setting down of her interpretation as it had stood when she had worked with the composer on the pieces in 1950-1. Nevertheless, I pointed out that the recording misrepresented Shostakovich's music, in that Nikolayeva, although aged only 66 at the time, was now having severe problems in getting her fingers around the notes (errors in the society's retyping of my review invalidated some of my references to her problems at specific places in the score). A further recording by her of Shostakovich piano works, issued by Hyperion in 1992, showed her playing at crisis point, being so inaccurate as to defy belief.

The frequently-quoted influence of Bach's Forty-eight Preludes and Fugues on Shostakovich's Opus 87 is minimal; the assumption that Shostakovich suddenly discovered Bach's music at the Leipzig Bach bicentennial celebrations in 1950 and then immediately set about writing fugues so as to introduce the German contrapuntal tradition to Russian culture is laughable, as Russian music has always had a strong polyphonic element (if one is seeking influences, one is more likely to find one by comparing Shostakovich's virtuoso Prelude and Fugue No.12 in G# minor with Taneyev's equally-virtuoso Prelude and Fugue in G# minor, Opus 29, of which Ashkenazy has made a memorable recording). By 1990, Nikolayeva seemed determined to entomb Shostakovich's pieces beneath a thick layer of pseudo-Bachian gloss, but "Bachian" in the anachronistic 1950s tradition of slow tempi and claustrophobic textures, with a uniform mood of seriousness and weight imposed on the music throughout.

By contrast, Ashkenazy allows each piece its own individual character, so his performance will have the effect of a breath of fresh air on listeners accustomed to Nikolayeva's unrelieved portentousness, a style of playing forced on her by loss of technique in her later years. Compare their performances of Fugue 15, for instance: here Ashkenazy achieves startling clarity at a genuine Allegro molto, yet Nikolayeva, even at her own impossibly-sluggish tempo, is struggling to play the piece at all, part of a bar even being omitted in the confusion. Fugue 17 provides one of the worst examples of her habit of simplifying the text when the going gets tough: here, at the passage written in two bass clefs, fragments of the lower voices are omitted, leaving scraps of incomplete lines which do not make thematic sense in isolation. With forty years' experience of playing this music, cheating of this sort should not be necessary; with Ashkenazy, every note is audible and he makes the piece even sound easy. After listening to his recording and taking his professional standards for granted it is a considerable shock to return to Nikolayeva's, where one finds elementary pianistic challenges such as the left hand octaves in Preludes 3 and 15 totally fouled up.

One of the most tiresome characteristics of the Hyperion set is the exaggerated emphasis of the fugue subjects. So monotonously are they highlighted in this way that when the appearance of a fugue subject passes without emphasis, the listener attributes this to an oversight by Nikolayeva, rather than conscious artistic intention on her part. In any genuinely polyphonic music, all of the individual lines are of interest, not just those featuring the subject, and there is little need to accentuate the main themes when they are heard repeatedly anyway. Moreover, overemphasis of these themes can mask interesting details in the subsidiary voices, details which may occur only once in the music. For much of the Hyperion set, the textures are debased to the level of "theme plus accompaniment" with the accompaniment heavily pedalled, resulting in a warm, superficially attractive sonority in the background, but with no focus or definition. Without the score, I doubt whether any skilled musician could identify the individual voices of Fugue 13 as Nikolayeva plays it: this is the only five-voiced fugue in the cycle, but as the piece is played with no sense of horizontal perspective, with memory lapses too, one's aural perception in places is of a series of homophonic block chords.

By contrast, Ashkenazy always shows discretion in his handling of fugal entries. His refined keyboard control allows him to bring elements of the texture into prominence without needing to shine a bright spotlight on them in order to do so; often he hints at the material on which he wants us to focus our attention by a slight intensification of dynamic on the relevant notes, a nuance so subtle as to amount to little more than a different shade of tonal colour, thus guiding our attention to the salient notes without distracting our awareness of the remainder of the texture.

Polyphonic music can cause problems on the piano: in ensemble music, separate lines are easy to differentiate because of their contrasting instrumental colours, but when on the piano two or more separate lines converge to the same register of the keyboard, the listener is often unable to distinguish which notes belong to each line, because of the similarity of timbre. The problem is compounded when a sustained note in one voice diverts the listener's attention temporarily onto the others, because when the first voice resumes its activity, its return to the texture can create the aural illusion that these notes are part of the other voices. In a purely acoustical sense, one still hears all of the notes, but the music is not intelligible unless one can identify the individual shapes of the two or more independent (yet interdependent) lines which the composer intended. When two lines cross over each other, it may not be obvious what is happening, with the result that at the crossover point the ear may mentally join up the midway point of line "A" with the midway point of line "B" and vice versa.

Ashkenazy's judgments concerning the balance of voices and the relative weight of each illustrate the care which has been taken over his preparation. He almost always clarifies which notes belong to which lines (Fugue 4 at 2'10" and Fugue 20 at 3'39" being two examples out of countless which could be cited) and when he doesn't (Fugue 8 at 2'52") it is at points where the composer's choices of spacings and dynamics make the task unrealistic. In general, pianists tackling polyphonic repertoire often phrase the main voice well but neglect to give adequate shaping to the background ones, which are played without finesse, often unsteady in dynamics. If one chooses a random passage and tries to focus one's attention on one of the subsidiary voices, the chances are that on Hyperion the subsidiary voice chosen will be inaudible, swamped by pedal, whereas in this new Decca set one finds that subsidiary voices are usually clearly audible, and most likely to be well shaped too.

Textually, Ashkenazy's playing is accurate, whereas Nikolayeva's recordings of Opus 87 (and other works by Shostakovich) contain misreadings of the text which derive from faulty early editions, which gives one little confidence in the supposedly-definitive 1980 Muzyka edition of Opus 87 which she herself edited. Next to this, the occasional blemishes by Ashkenazy, such as playing the misprint in Fugue 16 at 5'58" (this variant of the figuration applies only to the left hand in the previous bar) or misreading prominent notes in Prelude 14 at 0'58" or Prelude 17 at 0'13" (the composer's own recorded performances confirm which notes he intended) or Fugue 21 at 2'05", are insignificant.

The inconsistencies between the composer's indicated metronome markings and those adopted in his own recordings are well known, and Ashkenazy has reached his own conclusions about tempi, which are always convincing. He ignores Shostakovich's instructions that the opening of Fugue 4 should be slower than Prelude 4, and although there is no precedent for this in either the composer's 1952 or 1958 recordings, it should be remembered that Sviatoslav Richter did the same (and to a much greater extent) in a recording which the composer is known to have admired. There is no element of imitation here though, as Ashkenazy keeps the later acceleration of tempo in Fugue 4 more in harness than Richter chooses to (Marios Papadopoulos is superb here, doggedly persisting in a slow tempo to the end, maintaining the tension until the last note). Sometimes Ashkenazy's rethinking of individual pieces is radical, such as introducing a considerable climax into Fugue 16, which Shostakovich intended to be played pp throughout and he rejects the markings of p and dolce in Fugue 17, changes which take one aback initially, but which one accepts as valid alternative views on subsequent hearings.

Elsewhere the playing is less controversial, achieving its individuality through subtle touches. In Prelude 14, the tremolo is controlled precisely so as to regulate the tension, producing a performance as memorable as Richter's but again without imitating it: Richter increases the tempo midway, but Ashkenazy does not. It's a pleasure to hear the voices of Fugue 7 articulated so clearly, as this piece is often presented as a blur of pedalled arpeggios. After an unaccountably unrhythmic statement of the opening theme, Fugue 8 continues with a well-sustained intensity which holds one's concentration throughout, and although I prefer Papadopolous in this piece, with the astonishing atmosphere of grim oppression which he creates, Ashkenazy's performance here is in keeping with his refusal to exaggerate. For example, Fugue 13 is rather faster and less introspective than one might have expected, yet, on its own terms, the performance is a fine one, with the five-voiced counterpoint clear. Note too, how a few detached notes in the accompaniment in Prelude 13 introduce a lightweight mood to that piece absent from previous recordings. I particularly liked the insight with which Prelude and Fugue 18 is handled, the hushed and eerie alternation between minor and major at the end of the prelude followed by a fugue played with a cool poise which avoids banishing the introverted mood previously established. In Prelude 20, Ashkenazy plays the sustained bass octaves as notated, without the alterations which Nikolayeva was keen to relate that Shostakovich had designed specifically for her performances (these modifications, like others she mentions, are adopted in the composer's own recordings, made almost a year before Nikolayeva first performed Opus 87 in public) and the prelude sounds particularly desolate in its original format, as here, with the bass notes allowed to decay. Despite the incisive virtuosity summoned in other pieces when required (the set is worth buying for the stunning accounts of Preludes and Fugues 12, 15 and 21 alone) listeners will find it equally rewarding to return to Ashkenazy's performances of the more withdrawn pieces such as this.

The sound quality is excellent. It is remarkably consistent too, considering that the recording was made in different locations over a period of two years, and the occasional change in ambience noticeable between pieces (such as between Nos. 7 and 8) is not obtrusive. Combining a pleasant ambience with a sharp focus which suggests that at least one of the microphones was placed closely to the instrument, it is a more intimate sound than on some of the recordings the pianist has made in the last few years in Switzerland at St Charles Hall, Meggen, where he recorded his two Prokofiev discs. Good booklet notes by David Gutman are included.

Vladimir Ashkenazy's new set is the product of a great deal of thought and painstaking preparation. I have listened to it five times in its entirety and am sure that it is likely to prove to be a recording of lasting value. It would be welcome news if Decca restored to the current catalogue the six deleted recordings mentioned at the start of this article, which would form an interesting 2-CD set. I hope too that Tatiana Nikolayeva's 1962 version of Opus 87 will be issued eventually on CD. Any artist deserves to be remembered for their best achievements, and it is unfortunate that the 1987 Melodiya and 1990 Hyperion versions, the latter the object of indiscriminate media hype, have both badly misrepresented the true qualities of a respected musician who did so much to promote Shostakovich's music.

Raymond Clarke
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