🎼 Dmitri Shostakovich
24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87
➕ Prelude and Fugue in C-Sharp Minor (Shostakovich/Meyer)
🎹 Piano: Yulianna Avdeeva
🏢 Label: PENTATONE
📀 Released: 2025
🎧 Duration: approx. 2h30m
📍 Recorded at: Mendelssohn-Saal, Gewandhaus zu Leipzig
🔗 Available on all major streaming platforms
By Damián Autorino
Editor at Moto Perpetuo
For Yulianna Avdeeva, the connection with Shostakovich’s music began in childhood, playing short works full of playfulness and charm. But the 24 Preludes and Fugues, she says, “represent the entire spectrum of his soul” — from light to despair, from restraint to intensity.
This new double album, recorded in Leipzig — the very city where Shostakovich conceived the work in 1950 — offers a direct, deeply considered reading of Op. 87. In the booklet, Avdeeva describes the cycle as “a final statement” from the composer: forty-eight distinct characters, built in pairs of preludes and fugues across all major and minor keys, following the circle of fifths. Her performance doesn’t try to impose a narrative; it trusts the material and allows its contrasts to speak on their own terms.
The album closes with a notable first: the world premiere recording of a Prelude and Fugue in C-Sharp Minor, a fragment Shostakovich had set aside while composing Op. 87. Completed decades later by Krzysztof Meyer, a friend of the composer, it appears here for the first time within the full context of the cycle. Avdeeva premiered the piece in 2020 and includes it now as a kind of missing piece — one that enriches the whole without changing its essence.
This project was initiated as part of Leipzig’s commemorations of the 50th anniversary of Shostakovich’s death. For Avdeeva, who has performed widely and recorded Chopin, Bach, and contemporary Russian repertoire, this album marks both a culmination and a starting point: “a lifelong journey,” in her words, with one of the great piano works of the 20th century.
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