Sensitively Aware Piano concertos and a violin sonata - heard by ROBERT ANDERSON 'The performances do full justice to Shostakovich's demands ...'

Like many of its distinguished citizens, Shostakovich had a very chequered career under the Soviet Union. He was not even in his teens when Lenin took over, and managed to write his First Piano Concerto before the days of Stalin's overpowering presence. The vitriolic attack in 1936 on his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was accompanied with the suggestion that he should collect folksongs from villages. Stalin had joined Lenin in the Red Square mausoleum by the time of the Second Piano Concerto in 1957, but had been effectively demolished at the Twentieth Party Conference before composition of the 1969 Violin Sonata...

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH

ALEXANDER MELNIKOV

HARMONIA MUNDI

PIANO MUSIC

VIOLIN MUSIC

ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

RUSSIA