Dmitri Shostakovich: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 2

Product Description Shostakovich's two Piano Concertos span a period of almost thirty years. The youthful First Piano Concerto is a masterful example of eclecticism, its inscrutable humour and seriousness allied to virtuoso writing enhanced by the rôle for solo trumpet. Written as a birthday present for his son Maxim, the Second Piano Concerto is light-spirited with a hauntingly beautiful slow movement. With the permission of the composer's family, Boris Giltburg has arranged the exceptionally dark, deeply personal and powerful String Quartet No. 8, thereby establishing a major Shostakovich solo piano composition. Review " The quartet is a complex work, difficult both to play and to hear, and Giltburg has done a remarkable job of reducing it to piano form without having it sound like a reduction. Instead, it sounds a bit like an extended single-movement sonata/fantasia, a dark work (in C minor) evocative not quite of despair but surely of deep unhappiness, yet one whose central bitterness (carried through three movements) leads eventually to something of acceptance, if never quite affirmation, in the finale. Giltburg's arrangement comes across as a tribute to Shostakovich, an argument that this composer's music, like that of Bach, can at least sometimes be independent of the instruments on which it is performed, its underlying emotional resonance coming through differently but equally strongly on an instrument for which the work was never intended but one that is quite capable of evoking the feelings that Shostakovich strove so hard to elicit." --The Infodad Team Musical Toronto: 5 Stars "...What is so appealing about this record is that the Boris Giltburg has rethought the works through the prism of the composer's experiences..." "...With devastating precision, Giltburg - Moscow-born and winner of the Reine Elisabeth prize (first claimed by Emil Gilels) - has interpolated between the concertos his own piano reductions of one movement of the second string quartet and the entirety of the eight quartet, contemporaneous with the two piano concertos, exposing the composer's seditious inner thoughts. This is a constantly illuminating, almost faultless project." --Norman Lebrecht, Musical Toronto, January 13, 2017 CLASSICS TODAY: Artistic Quality 10/Sound Quality 10 "These are big, bold, in-your-face performances that find a wider range of expression in b