Album Notes

SHOSTAKOVICH: Preludes & Fugues Nos. 1-10, Op. 87
J.S. Bach died in 1750. Exactly 200 years later, the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich made a pilgrimage to Leipzig to hear Tatiana Nikolaeva play at (and win) the J.S. Bach Competition. In her honor he began composing his own series of 24 keyboard preludes and fugues, modeled after Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier.

The Shostakovich works have remained relatively unknown until recent years, despite being proclaimed by many critics as among his greatest masterworks; to a degree this is because he is principally associated with orchestral music. This disc offers the first ten of the complete series, as recorded in 1987 by Nikolaeva, who played these works for over 30 years. The work is dedicated to Mme. Nikolaeva, who gave the first performance in 1952. She recorded it three times, and died suddenly after playing it in concert in San Francisco in 1992