Theatre Music

"This CD is a breath of fresh air in every way: the world premiere recordings. These are fine slices of Shostakovichian genius, with all the acerbic irony and satirical, deadpan bite that you would expect from him. If this disc is anything to go by, Hayroundinoff's a pianist out of the ordinary. More from him, please, Chandos!"
***** Five Stars BBC Music Magazine (August 2001)

Critic's Choice - The Best CDs of 2001 (BBC Music Magazine)

Rustem Hayroudinoff makes his debut on Chandos with extracts from eight of Shostakovich's theatrical scores in piano reductions or arrangements by the composer himself or trusted colleagues. Most of these works are not currently available on disc and all but two of them are premiere recordings.

Rustem Hayroudinoff studied at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory and the Royal Academy of Music in London. He has performed worldwide to high critical acclaim and has appeared on both television and radio.

During his lifetime Shostakovich's worldwide reputation was founded essentially on his symphonies, concertos and vocal-instrumental chamber music. The busy and amazingly prolific theatre composer he had been in the early thirties was transformed into a symphonic soothsayer, a latter-day Beethoven whose earlier career had started out in the wrong direction. This is not to say the theatre music of Shostakovich had been totally ignored. For example, piano arrangements of various excerpts were from time to time made for publication in the form of suites, some of which found favour as 'accessible' light music during the period following the composer's second fall from grace in 1948. But to bring together a representative collection of this music in its original format, using the piano arrangements made by the composer or his licensed colleagues, was a project not undertaken in Soviet Russia until 1977, two years after his death, when Sovetskii Kompositor issued a volume entitled Shostakovich: Music to Plays.

It is timely to welcome a substantial issue of this hitherto fragmented repertoire - especially in these brilliant and affectionate performances - as the pieces might have been played over by Shostakovich himself in the preliminary stages of a theatre production; placed alongside his better-known music for solo piano they form a welcome addition. Here is a wealth of piano miniatures: epigrammatic character pieces that can take on a life of their own independent of their original theatre context, full of tunefulness, humour, charm and occasional unexpected depths.