I learned this music when I was fifteen and saw a documentary on tv in which Vladimir Ashkenazy played one of the pieces. That struck a chord with me. I had already been obsessed with Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier for some time and this twentieth-century variant fascinated me immediately.Hannes Minnaar
When Hannes Minnaar, one of the leading musicians of our time, was recording Bach's Goldberg Variations in 2020, he already brought up the plan to make a cd with the 24 Preludes and Fugues opus 87 by Dmitri Shostakovich. With this pure music of Bach in mind, the thoughts naturally turned to this work by the Russian, he explains. That is not very strange, despite the more than two hundred years between the creation of these pieces: both works form their own universe of polyphonic music.
Like almost every composer, Shostakovich was occupied with Bach's oeuvre throughout his life. His preludes and fugues, composed in 1950/1951, are more extreme than those of Bach. Especially in the preludes, which are sometimes symphonic in character. And although the fugues are just as strict as those of Bach, he invents his own rules: for example, the first fugue is only played on white keys. The theme of the seventh fugue is essentially one large broken chord. In his own way, he explores the boundaries of possibilities.
After Bach's Goldberg Variations, which earned him worldwide recognition (including a Diapason d'Or), Hannes Minnaar demonstrates the qualities of his piano playing again on this album: his nuanced touch, spontaneity, natural finesse in phrasing and a familiarity with the score go hand in hand with a freshness that evokes a feeling of improvisation. The result is a new milestone in the series of interpretations of this beautiful music.
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