Shostakovich: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 & 2,Opp.35,102 / Piano Quintet,Op.57
This is a splendid recording, featuring three of Shostakovich's major works involving his own instrument, the piano. They display all the mercurial, contradictory aspects of his style, from dance-hall banality to sophisticated counterpoint and inspired melodic inventiveness, from mournful desolation and bleak hopelessness to the wild, obsessive, sardonic humor of desperation. The two piano concertos, though written over 20 years apart, show a certain similarity in their melancholy slow movements and frantically rollicking Finales, though the first, more popular one, opens with a highly dramatic movement, the second with a relatively peaceful one. The recording brings together a Russian-born virtuoso pianist with a special affinity for the composer's style, a great quartet steeped in 20th-century music, and a first-rate orchestra. The resulting performances are brilliant, moving, and exciting; Bronfman's virtuosity is stunning and the solo trumpeter in the first concerto is terrific. The string playing is wonderful--rich and colorful in sound, rhythmically incisive, deeply expressive; the first violinist's tone soars radiantly in the many stratospheric passages.--Edith Eisler