Here is, at the very least, a Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues cycle to be reckoned with. Admittedly, it starts none too promisingly with, by the highest standards, a rhythmically stiff, tonally lumpy C major Prelude and some overpedalling in the fugue (beyond anything enforced by the impractical spacings). This is music with a wealth of undeclared experience behind its complacent-seeming harmonies and pure white-note counterpoint. It begins what was, at least on one level, Shostakovich’s musical answer to the January 1948 Zhdanov crackdown, and while that thought need in no way constrain an interpretation, it should surely provoke a more searching response than Ashkenazy’s.
The neo-baroque figuration of the A minor Prelude and its spiky Fugue, on the other hand, presents his true credentials. On form and well prepared, as here, Ashkenazy remains a formidably fluent pianist, and the clarity and energy he brings to the faster, denser pieces is surpassed only, I would say, by Richter (who plays just six of the Preludes and Fugues). Check out the brainstorm of the chromatic D flat major Fugue (No. 15) for an especially impressive example.
The sound itself is quite ‘pingy’, with a generous ambience behind it (not overdone though, as Hyperion’s is for Nikolaieva). That serves to heighten the impact of the more demonstrative pieces, but makes it difficult for Ashkenazy to sustain the atmosphere of the more meditative ones. Or maybe he simply doesn’t feel the music that way. Certainly the A flat major Fugue (No. 17) comes out sounding nothing like the piano dolce of the composer’s marking; nor is the B flat major Fugue (No. 21) remotely piano. Truth to tell, he has never been famed as a pianist-philosopher, and such pieces find him struggling to maintain inner tension, resorting to awkward-sounding agogic pauses and prone to hardness of tone in fortissimos. That said, he can still offer a deeply-felt account of the long, anguished F sharp minor Fugue (No. 8), following a properly edgy one of the Jewish-inflected Prelude, and he is equally fine in the elevated consolatory tone of the F major Prelude (No. 23). No less affecting is his control of the ebbing drama towards the end of the G sharp minor Fugue, the mid-point of the cycle, eventually to be balanced by the defiant accumulation of the D minor No. 24.
In this final Fugue, where you can almost hear Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony being born, Ashkenazy fails to build the texture as mightily as the early stages lead you to expect. Nikolaieva surpasses him here, and in general she reveals both subtler and grander perspectives, especially in her tauter, more drily recorded 1987 Melodiya set. Supplement this with the composer’s interpretatively matchless though pianistically variable accounts of 18 of the Preludes and Fugues (if you can: the two Revelation discs are rapidly disappearing) and you will have phenomenal riches in store.
Even so the balance-sheet for Ashkenazy comes out comfortably in the black. For consistency of pianism, straightforward integrity of interpretation and high quality of recording, his new set can be warmly recommended. By contrast Keith Jarrett’s, though highly accomplished and beautifully recorded, tends towards the blandly superficial, while Olli Mustonen’s, now under way for RCA, has the opposite leaning, towards unmotivated idiosyncrasy.'