Rodion Shchedrin plays Shchedrin 24 Preludes and Fugues

In memory of Rodion Shchedrin. See below for his text about the work.

Book 1 – Sharp Keys – recorded in 1966
00:00 – 1
02:05 – 2
06:05 – 3
09:35 – 4
14:21 – 5
17:38 – 6
22:32 – 7
25:06 – 8
28:48 – 9
33:10 – 10
36:56 – 11
41:37 – 12

Book 2 – Flat keys – recorded in 1971
45:20 – 13
48:08 – 14
51:19 – 15
56:22 – 16
01:00:07 – 17
01:03:49 – 18
01:07:51 – 19
01:10:07 – 20
01:20:11 – 21
01:23:54 – 22
01:29:48 – 23
01:35:38 – 24

Thinking Aloud When Hearing My Preludes and Fugues

It was in 1951 that Dmitry Shostakovich first played his latest work, his 24 Preludes and Fugues, in a cellar-like room at the headquarters of the Union of Soviet Composers in the Myuskaya Ulitsa (now the Ulitsa Tchayanov) in Moscow. It was a notable occasion and one that I still remember vividly - I was a student in my second year at the Conservatory. Shostakovich had just put the finishing touches to the piece and performed it from his manuscript, playing nervously, often raising his hand to stop his glasses from slipping down his nose and making mistakes. Some of the forte passages were brutally harsh – more like "banging" than actual playing – but his work left such a powerful impression that I felt an immediate desire to write a similar cycle.

These memories of 1951 have set me thinking. We are once again living in an age that generates untruths, new untruths. Which of the musicians of the former Soviet Union does not now consider it advantageous to rewrite history, to massage his image not just for professional reasons (which are often less than compelling) and make political capital by claiming that he was persecuted in the Soviet Union, never received any awards and was never given anything to play, that what he wanted to write was suppressed and what he did write was never performed?

No one will describe Shostakovich's Preludes and Fugues as a mellifluously sweet-sounding work. And yet they appeared in 1951. Three years earlier – in that terrible year of 1948 – the thunderclouds gathered over Shostakovich's head, lightning flashed and the world of music itself was threatened by Stalin's fulminations. And implacable fate allowed the dictator to survive until 1953. Yet even at this exceptionally difficult and terrible time of his life, Shostakovich was able to write such a highly intellectual, "western" piece and perform it in public.

And my own 24 Preludes and Fugues will likewise hardly be called a mellifluously sweet-sounding work politely kowtowing to Brezhnev. Following the example of the great Shostakovich, I wrote these pieces for myself between 1964 and 1970, wrote them regardless of the period and proceeded to play them in public. Who else wrote 24 Preludes and Fugues in Russia during the sixties and seventies? And who played them in public himself?

God knows, I am not saying this out of nostalgia for the Soviet past. I only want the truth. All you music analysts should remember that life is never black and white – seven pure pairs and seven impure ones (how simple that would be!). Life is always full of infinite possibilities, subtle shades and half-tones, even under the accursed Soviet system. What this means is that people who were once enviously mendacious have remained so today, so keen are they to present themselves in a flattering light. They are always ready to spit on their rivals, to cover them in dirt and to invent stories about them. What a pity that credulous western musicologists should have allowed themselves to be influenced by such dubious tales. And they keep on repeating such stories, taking them over from books into articles, and from articles into books, instead of attempting simply to listen to the music. Listen to the music, note the year of composition and then judge the work as you think best.

My 24 Preludes and Fugues are divided into two volumes, the first of which contains all the sharp keys, the second all the flat keys. I later adopted a similar approach when dividing up my Fourth Piano Concerto. Here, in a work lasting a total of 35 minutes, I did not use a single flat sign but, in a paroxysm of minimalist asceticism, limited myself to sharp signs.

The preludes in my cycle fulfil the role of introductions and are, as it were, overtures to the fugues. The prelude is never an independent piece but invariably a predicate or preface, a way of preparing for the main business. And the preludes are shorter and more aphoristic than the fugues.

– Rodion Shchedrin, 26 May 1996