Given his mastery of large-scale form in symphonies and quartets, plus his prowess as a pianist, you might expect Shostakovich's solo piano music to figure as prominently in his output, and in the concert repertory, as Prokofiev's. In fact, with the exception of the tumultuous First Sor.aia, the piano works are severely disciplined, rather private affairs, rarely given to Prokofievian displays of panache.
The Second Sonata of 1943 is a memorial to Shostakovich's piano professor, Leonid Nikolaev, and a grave, restrained memorial it is too. Martin Jones on AVM Classics seems not to have grasped the Iressage, for his playing in the second and third movements is prosaic and lacks inner intensity, while his technical command is questionable in the opening allegrerro. Moreover, he is not weil recorded; the instrument is sub-standard, with a glassy treble and woolly mid-register (exacerbated by over-pedalling). Wolfgang Plagge is far more successful in terms of basic soundquality, and he gets somewhere near the desolation at the heart of the finale (considering the thematic similarity to the Cello Sonata finale, it is as though Shostakovich has brought into the open the underlying sadness of that work). He is not so successful with the elusive largo, however, and the first movement could do with a more singing melodic line and more rhythmical control in the accompaniment. Boris Berman is markedly more expansive in the finale and justifies every second of that expansiveness, from the stricken quality of the therr.e, through each of its nine variations. Even he misses out in parts of the first movenent—where the march-like second subject peters out into disillusionment, for instance—and his rubato in the second movement is overdone. But he is obviously conscious of the unspoken meanings behind the music and his interpretation is far and away the most successful of the three (and second only in my experience to Gilels, whose LP on RCA—nla—is long overdue for CD reissue).
The remainder of Berman's disc is devoted to five well-contrasted preludes and fugues. The C major is too slow and some curious crackles mar what is otherwise a first-rate recording quality. But the A minor is very fine and the E minor shows that he is fully at home in the inner wastelands of Shostakovich's music. The popular, extrovert D flat is superbly played, with due attention to its disturbing undercurrents as well as its virtuosic surface. I remember Berman as a musicianly and adventurous semi-finalist at Leeds in the year of Alexeev, Uchida, Schiff and Devoyon, courageously offering Schoenberg's Op. 11. It is good to see that he has developed into an artist of real quality.
There are many good things in Plagge's Prokofiev Sixth Sonata, notably the accumulation of the first movement development and the slow swing of the 9/8 Tempo di valzer. What he lacks is variety of touch and, especially, accent—frequently a more oratorical top voice would release the constriction in his playing. In addition the allegretto second movement is hurried, beyond Plagge's ability to maintain clarity and characterization, and even more dramatic tension is required for the lyrical contrast in the first movement, the climax of the slow movement and the cyclic return in the finale.'