| Label: BIS
Catalog: SACD1858
Format: SACD HYBRID Wholenote Discoveries - May 2011
Armenian cellist Alexander Chaushian is teamed with Russian pianist Yevgeny Sudbin on a hybrid SACD featuring works by Rachmaninov, Shostakovich and Borodin. Their playing has the strength, warmth and conviction that these pieces need, and they are beautifully recorded. The balance felt a bit “pro-piano” at first, but it only served to underline that these are piano/cello duos, and not solo cello pieces with piano accompaniment. Rachmaninov’s G minor sonata opens the disc, and his Vocalise closes it. In between we have two works that couldn’t be more different. The Borodin Sonata in B minor is a real oddity: the manuscript, apparently, has survived only in “fragmentary form” and this performance is of the version completed by Russian composer and musicologist Mikhail Goldstein in 1982, “with a slightly abbreviated finale” whatever that means. How much is Borodin, and how much Goldstein, who knows? An earlier Goldstein “discovery” turned out to be his own work. What’s more, the material itself is quite strange. While doing post-doctoral scientific research in Heidelberg around 1860, Borodin lived next door to a violinist who kept playing the Bach G minor unaccompanied violin sonata; the fugue subject fascinated Borodin, and it forms the basis for the cello sonata, appearing in each of the three movements – in fact, it starts the first and third movements. The second movement, however, opens as pure Norwegian Grieg! Quite a stylistic feat. The Shostakovich D minor sonata, his first major chamber work, points the way to the composer’s future in more ways than one: written in 1934, it hints at the distinctive style that was to come, but it was also the work Shostakovich was touring with the cellist Viktor Kubatsky in 1936 when Pravda printed the attack on his music that would forever change his life. Terry Robbins  Price: $28.98 |
