I first got to know 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 been obsessed with Bach's Wohltemperierte Klavier for a while by then, 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 proposed the plan to make a CD of Dmitri Shostakovich's 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87. With this pure music of Bach in mind, his thoughts naturally turned to this work by the Russian composer, he explains. That is not very strange, despite the some two hundred years between the creation of these pieces: both works form their own universe of polyphonic music.
Like virtually every composer, Shostakovich occupied himself with the oeuvre of Bach throughout his life. His preludes and fugues, composed in 1950/1951, are indeed more extreme than Bach's. Especially in the preludes, which are sometimes symphonic in character. And although the fugues are just as strict as Bach's, he invents his own rules: the first fugue, for example, is played only on the white keys. The theme of the seventh fugue is essentially one large broken chord. In his own way, he explores the boundaries of what is possible.
After Bach's Goldberg Variations, which brought him worldwide recognition (including a Diapason d'Or), Hannes Minnaar once again reveals the qualities of his pianism 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 sense of improvisation. The result is a new milestone in the line of interpretations of this beautiful music.
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