CLASSICAL NET:
This extremely generously-filled disc is the first of a series from Divine Art highlighting the mostly neglected repertoire of Russian solo piano works, and judging from this initial helping, there is much that one can discover and enjoy.

The only pieces that command a certain popularity are the two sonatas by Shostakovich, so it is no wonder that the album is entitled "Shostkovich and Comrades". Indeed in one way or another all the composers featured were contemporaries of the great man, and all the music in the programme, not surprisingly reflects the trying artistic times that they and many others like them had to endure.

The only exception in this collection is Ronald Stevenson's "Recitative and Air", a piece commissioned by the Union of Soviet Composers to commemorate Shostakovich's 70 th birthday. By the time the piece was finished, Shostakovich was dead and in the composer's own words, the work turned out to be a sort of "in memoriam piece".

The album is a mixture of the late romantic and the modern, but each composition betrays a strong underlying tension of tragedy and doom. Murray McLachlan plays with intensity and affirmation and his razor-sharp articulation helps to make a persuasive case for this challenging music. An auspicious start to what should be a hugely stimulating cycle, with notes and sound which are both first rate.
Gerald Fenech

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE:
Originally issued for Shostakovich's centenary in 2006 (as Shostakovich and his Comrades ), this disc now promises to be the first in a Divine Art series of Russian piano music. Murray McLachlan brings an eloquent intensity to the first movement of Kabalevsky's Piano Sonata No.3, and is equally at home in the slow movement's touching vein of elegy and the harlequinesque finale.
Myaskovsky's Song and Rhapsody is one of his most spontaneous and innately lyrical utterances; McLachlan has clear affection for the piece, as for Ronald Stevenson's intensely elegiac Recitative and Air (DSCH). Shchedrin's burlesque concerto for solo piano Naughty Limericks stands at the opposite emotional pole, and is thrown off with all the requisite fizz.
But pride of place goes to Shostakovich's two Sonatas. McLachlan's performance of the furious and technically challenging First is very good indeed, on a par with Raymond Clarke's version on Athene. In No.2 the competition is fiercer (Nikolayeva on Hyperion, Lyubimov on ECM and Vladimir Viardo on Nonesuch, for instance), but McLachlan makes his personality felt in his firm delineation of the piece's architecture and the intense lyricism he brings to its often bare textures.
Performance êêêê Recording êêêê
Calum MacDonald

DSCH JOURNAL:
A bounty of piano treats awaits the musical Russophile on this [disc] featuring Soviet-era works for the solo instrument. Murray McLachlan's programme offers a colourful cross-section of composition by the household names of the era' .

McLachlan, a well-known name to readers of the Journal, has amassed a distinguished discography dedicated to the lesser-known repertoire of the 20 th century. He has devoted entire discs to the piano music of, in turn, Sir Arthur Sullivan, Charles Camilleri, and John R. Williamson among others, as well as a host of notable Scottish figures. His highly acclaimed interpretations of the complete piano sonatas of Weinberg, Myaskovsky, Alexander Tcherepnin, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich have placed him at the forefront of Western interpreters of the Soviet/Russian repertoire.

McLachlan's idiomatic connection to the works on the programme is clearly evident as he brings off each with complete authority. Dmitri Kabalevsky's Third Sonata of 1945, the one famously recorded by Vladimir Horowitz, stakes a claim as a worthy if lesser-known brethren to Prokofiev's ‘War Sonatas'. Nikolai Myaskovsky's Song and Rhapsody is a true character piece that captures that composer's propensity for spinning out long-limbed tunes that yearn for the

days of onion domes and samovars. Ronald Stevenson's Recitative and Air (DSCH) finds no escape from its weary procession of inward turns until a snapping point leads to a final desolate utterance of the DSCH motto. McLachlan concludes his programme with Tschastuschki: Concerto for piano solo, Rodion Shchedrin's 1999 solo piano rendition of his brilliant orchestral tour-de-force, Concerto for Orchestra No. 1, Naughty Limericks . Much of the effect of the original orchestral version rests upon the combination and rapid interplay of various instrumental sections, details that are not only compromised, but rather muddied in this very busy piano reduction. Those who already know the work in its orchestral garb will still take delight in hearing how the dazzling melodic overlays are realized and projected in McLachlan's thrilling one-of-a-kind rendition.

Sometimes I wonder whether Shostakovich, in his youthful defiance, set out to write music's most difficult piano sonata. For its melting pot of widely disparate styles and treacherously dense textures, the First Piano Sonata makes an excellent candidate for the honour. The performer is faced with the nearly impossible challenge of making sense of the score's lethal terrain of rapidly changing episodes. One imagines Shostakovich would have taken vicarious delight in the triumphs and failures of the attempts.

For the most part, McLachlan's aggressive approach yields good results. The disparate elements of the work gel thanks to the driving momentum and vigorous brilliance of his playing. At the same time, in the first and lengthiest section, the themes tend to get a bit muddied as a result of his pushing the tempi a little too strenuously. By way of concluding these breakneck passages, he sustains the fermata-marked chord in its final bars for a daring 42 seconds – an interval of recovery that will no doubt leave listeners drop-jawed, for better or worse. Martin Jones, without sacrificing similar measures of speed or exuberance, manages to sort out the individual ideas in this section with greater clarity. Both versions may be compared to the beautifully conceived one by Melvin Chen, who sees past the work's expressionistic surface with a vibrant high romantic view, one whose daring rubati and frequent spotlighting provide the most colourful delineations of the work's knobbly themes. Konstantin Scherbakov, on the other hand, provides a lurid how-not-to guide as he thrashes about with erratic tempi so as to render meaningless the sonata's points of structural and emotional demarcation.

In the central slow section, McLachlan seems more preoccupied with maintaining the music's forward pulse than with conjuring its dusky phantoms. He thus forfeits the subtle enchantment found in Chen's more textured reading of the section. McLachlan's tightly wrapped interpretation of the Sonata, though somewhat wanting in expressive detail, still consolidates and impresses with its iron will.

McLachlan fares better in his rendition of the Second Piano Sonata, discussed below in comparison with Lilia Boyadjieva's recording. The sheer beauty of tone that Boyadjieva brings to the keyboard is of a calibre not often found in Shostakovich's piano music. With its satin finish and pearl-like clarity, she casts a beguiling spell over her instrument as well as over the music on this programme.

Murray McLachlan and Lilia Boyadjieva each offer a sturdy performance of Shostakovich's wartime Sonata No. 2. Both pianists evince no shortage of power or imagination in negotiating its challenging unconventional pages, though it is McLachlan who commands a firmer grasp of the work's architecture. Boyadjieva's more flexible tempi in the brittle rhythms of the opening Allegretto allow her to explore a wider range of mood than McLachlan's. He, on the other hand, carries a more taut line and with it, a more steely spirit of determination. In the Largo , each pianist sidesteps the detached numbness one sometimes finds in other interpretations. Boyadjieva discovers uncanny beauty in the music's achingly hesitant tones by underlining the music's lyrical continuity, here with inspiring fluidity. McLachlan introduces more of an edge to the music, and thus, more definition. He plays the movement with a palpable sense of distress that rises to peak emotional moments.

Boyadjieva delivers a well-polished final movement as she embraces the various moods of the mighty variations in all manner of detail. McLachlan's version, however, makes the stronger impression. Not only does he engage with the music more vigorously, he achieves a more unified vision, in part, by approaching each variation as a direct emotional consequence of the one preceding it. He builds the tension across Variations II and III so that the sharply punctuated chords in Variation IV and the rising tenor of Variation V become captivating plateaus of arrival.

While Boyadjieva gives very probing readings of these sections, she dwells more on their subtleties than on their cumulative effect. Only in McLachlan's reading does the urgent prodding of Variation VI recall the panting two-note exchanges of the Allegro non troppo movement of Symphony No. 8, written the same year. The heightened tension allows McLachlan to plunge directly into the smoky sonorities that follow in Variation VII – an eerie reappearance of the ghosts from the sonata's slow movement. The music's emotional roller coaster takes yet another sharp turn as McLachlan evinces, with bold iambic strokes, the proud defiance of Variation VIII. Both pianists capture the utter despondency of Variation IX with its whispering tones and concluding grief-bearing ritardando, leading to the valedictory flourish of the last variation. However it is McLachlan in these final sections who leaves listeners with the sense of having more ardently weathered the journey.
Louis Blois

MUSICWEB:
The new series of Russian Piano Music from Divine Art begins auspiciously with a volume devoted to Shostakovich and Comrades , a single disc, which includes some exceptional examples of twentieth-century works for piano. At the core of this recording are the two piano sonatas of Shostakovich, which receive a fine reading by Murray McLachlan and also benefit from the context created in this CD through related works. The selections fit well together and offer an opportunity to hear some works that are otherwise difficult to find.

Shostakovich's First Piano Sonata (1926) is often regarded as an angry piece, and the edgy, aggressive qualities of this one-movement essay emerge readily in McLachlan's interpretation. He captures its spirit in the performance, and never flags in bringing out its intensity. McLachlan nicely evokes the rebellious tone that the young composer expressed in this early work. This performance has a percussive quality, which supports the style of the piece appropriately.

In contrast to the First Piano Sonata, the Second (1942) is more reflective in tone and adopts a conventional approach to form with its three movements. Unlike the shifting tempos of the various sections that comprise the First, Shostakovich opens with an Allegretto , which makes use of sonata form. McLachlan brings out the structure nicely, and he complements this approach with a meditative approach to the Largo that follows. The third movement ( Moderato ) is a set of variations (9), which are subtly artful in the way the ideas are manipulated. McLachlan makes the form emerge with clarity, and his playing is both authoritative and comfortable.

The other works in this recording are by composers whose names are familiar. Kabalevsky may be known better to modern audiences for his orchestral music, but the Third Piano Sonata (1946), the piece with which the CD opens, is a fine example of the composer's style for this medium. McLachlan offers a facile reading, in which Kabalevsky evinces some affinities with Prokofiev. The motoric rhythm of the first movement emerges nicely in this performance; yet the second movement could benefit from a slightly slower tempo. The Finale itself is effective for the impetuous quality McLachlan brings to the music. At times the speed seems impossible to maintain, and McLachlan succeeds not only in doing so, but also in bringing the piece to a satisfying conclusion.

Nikolai Miaskovsky, a slightly older contemporary of Kabalevsky, is known for his nine sonatas. He is represented in this recording with the two-movement Song and Rhapsody , Op. 58 (1942). The first movement has a nicely angular lyricism, which McLachlan exploits well. Yet in the Rhapsody, Myaskovsky explores textures and sonorities reminiscent of Impressionism. While those sounds initially suggest earlier times, Myaskovsky establishes his own style as the piece develops. In a similar way, the British composer Ronald Stevenson offers a further perspective on the lyrical piano piece in his Recitative and Air (DSCH), a piece which dates from 1974 and pays homage to Shostakovich with the sogetto cavato theme based on the composer's name (D, S [Es=E-flat]), C, H (German pitch name for B-natural). This set of variations is simultaneously a tribute to Shostakovich and a highly evocative work on its own merits. In a recording focused on Shostakovich and his comrades, Stevenson's piece is a highly effective addition to the already innovative program.

The recording concludes with a virtuoso piece by the contemporary composer Rodion Shchedrin (b. 1932), in Tashastuschki , his 1999 transcription for solo piano of an orchestral work from 1963. The single-movement work is a multi-textured piece which works well for solo piano. While the final section seems to push the limits of solo piano music, it remains effective in conveying the effects that exist in the orchestral score. McLachlan is good to explore the various colors of the piano in this virtuosic piece. It rounds out the recording with the appropriate tone.

Through the selections he chose for this recording McLachlan contributes some fine perspectives on twentieth century piano music from Russia . It is by no means a complete picture, but provides a fine introduction to the repertoire, which bears rehearing, particularly in the hands of such a fine interpreter.
Jim Zychowicz 

MID WEST RECORD:
Obviously a little tunnel vision on my part, but I didn't think McLachlan had interests that went outside the British Isles.  Here we find him turning his gaze and ear to Russia and letting his fingers fly on some works by composers you know too well and some you probably never heard of as he continues his musical excavations in fine style.  In fact it turns out that McLachlan has Russian music as a prime love and it shows in his playing.  He even sneaks in some sly humor by including a non Russian whose a passionate socialist.  And none of it hits you over the head like “Volga Boat Men”.  A real find for those that want to expand horizons with a tour guide that loves his work.
Chris Spector

MUSICAL POINTERS:
This release is the first in a projected series exploring Russian Piano Music and is a fine demonstration of McLachlan's virtuosity and stamina.

It was recorded at Chetham's during the 2006 Festival for Pianists and consists of complete "takes"; a refreshing change from the prevailing fashion: q.v. Tony Faulkner - - People like me spend much of our lives in control-rooms listening to musical shrapnel, artists doing repeated short sections manically - - (November 2009 Editorial, Classical Source). Recommended.
Peter Grahame Woolf

LIVERPOOL DAILY POST:
Shostakovich is played by Manchester-based Murray McLachlan. On a disc entitled Russian Piano Music Volume 1, on the Divine Art label, he plays the two piano sonatas, together with sonata No. 3 of Kabalevsky, a Song and Rhapsody by Myaskovsky, and a Recitative and Air on the initials DSCH by Ronald Stevenson. The romantic Russian music by composers not quite so familiar in this country is proving well worthwhile, as is the CD.
Peter Spaull

MUSICA (Italy) (joint review of vols 1-5):
This is a nice collection of CDs of the Russian piano repertoire. The next two are soon to be released [and are now available on divine art dda25095 and 25096] , but the fact that they will include Rachmaninov's and Prokofiev's pieces makes them less interesting, at least for their rarity. While, instead, recordings completely devoted to works by Arensky, Lyapunov, Glière and Rebikov are not released every day. On this our acknowledgements go to the British company [Divine Art], new on the Italian market.. The interpreter of the four single-composer CDs and also the author of the excellent informative notes included is Anthony Goldstone; while the first CD of the collection, which features several composers, is interpreted by Murray McLachlan: Kabalevsky's and Shostakovich's sonatas are not new to the record industry, but the pieces by Myaskovsky, Stevenson and Shchedrin – though not at their first recording here – can be considered real rarities.

The four composers of the monographic CDs represent, in the Russian music scene, as many different positions, equidistant from both Romanticism and Impressionism, for sure closer to Tchaikovsky than to Mussorgsky and the Group of Five; and in the case of Rebikov and Glière, who died in 1920 and 1956 – the modernistic poetics from the 20th century.

Having lived a short and profligate life, Anton Arensky left less rich a production than he could have. Still, he wrote a hundred pieces for piano, inspired by the romanticism of Chopin and Tchaikovsky, which informed his work to the utmost. He also taught Rachmaninov and Scriabin. These days Arensky is mainly renowned for the lovely waltz from the first Suite for two pianos, but his Studies and Preludes are valuable too; and mainly the six Essais sur des rythmes oubliées , Op.28, with its unusual metres.

Sergei Lyapunov (who lived a longer and more sober life than Arensky but one which was no more productive) was also a great romantic, in the line of Chopin, Liszt and Anton Rubinstein, but in his works the popular Russian tradition is more present, because he was a close friend and pupil of Balakirev, father of the “Five”, who dedicated to Lyapunov the Sonata for piano he finally completed in 1905. In answer to this Lyapunov composed the Sonata Goldstone plays here. If Arensky is renowned for his lovely waltz, works by Lyapunov are performed too every now and then, mainly during the conservatoire exams: especially some of the twelve Transcendental Studies that complete the tonal cycle Liszt started with his works of this name. The CD includes the sonata and some other works, the well-known Fêtes de Noël , Op.41, among them.

Vladimir Rebikov, the third of these composers to be born in the 1860s, died in 1920; though far less renowned than the two abovementioned, he produced a much more innovative musical language: Stravinsky himself mentions him in this sense. His innovations anticipate certain harmonic aspects of the 20th century (whole-tone system, unresolved harmonies, pieces without bars and metre, tone clusters). At the beginning of the CD Goldstone performs two short pieces where Rebikov anticipates two moments that are reminiscent of both Stravinsky ( Le sacre du printemps ) and Messiaen ( Quatuor pour la fin du temps ). Apart from this peculiarity, Rebikov's piano production, also because of his natural bent for teaching, is made up of short and very short pieces (on the CD sixteen out of forty-three last less than one minute). However, there is also a major work, a ‘tableau musical-psycologique' entitled Esclavage et liberté (Op.22). Other oddities: a cycle of seven pieces that lasts three minutes and a half ( Une fête , Op.38) and one out of four pieces written without accidentals, on white keys only ( Chansons blanches , Op.48).

While Rebikov and Lyapunov died shortly after the establishment of the Soviet regime, Reinhold Glière lived all through the period of Stalinism, outliving the dictator himself by three years. As a composer he remained a traditionalist Romantic, and he didn't reject the opportunity to celebrate a few feasts of the new regime with his music. Also Glière wrote short pieces for piano, mainly in Chopin's tradition but as well in that Russian piano music style of the day, led by the influence of Scriabin. A wonderful pianist, Arensky's and Taneyev's pupil, he reached his creative peak in the 25 Preludes Op.30 ( twenty-five as he adds to the series – which follows Bach's, not Chopin's harmonic order – one last Prelude in C major, just as Alkan did): an impressive, extremely varied and interesting series. The spirit of Chopin, inherited through his Polish mother, marks Glière's short Mazurka (Op.29), and the eloquent simplicity of the Esquisses Op.47 betrays educational, but mostly appropriate, intentions. As for his discography, Anthony Goldstone is an interpreter we can't overlook. The repertoire he presents is not just special and precious, but also put forward with remarkable cultural intelligence: each one of his CDs can be said to develop a theme. This knowledge of the various repertoires also enables him to move with extreme versatility from genre to genre, from composer to composer, from character to character: from the sentimentalism, a little frivolous, of some of Arensky's pieces, to the irony of work by Rebikov; from Lyapunov's Russian-style harmonies to the cyclical integrity of Glière's Preludes , everything performed through the vaguely archaic sound of a Grotrian piano, Goldstone convinces and charms us.
Riccardo Risaliti

FANFARE:
Originally recorded and released on Dunelm in 2006, this centennial tribute to Shostakovich offers an illuminating context for his two piano sonatas, setting them against the piano music of two older composers who matured under Stalin as well as against the music of two younger composers (only one of whom is Russian) who followed in his wake. Granted, I'm not really taken with Shchedrin's 1999 reduction of his 1963 Naughty Limericks , a flamboyantly colored orchestral show-piece that loses much of its slapstick sarcasm in this black-and-white rendition; nor does the choice of Kabalevsky's most oft-recorded piano work contribute as much as a more offbeat selection (even the Second Sonata) might have done. Still, the recital makes coherent sense as a whole.

Murray McLachlan plays with tremendous enthusiasm and conviction, and heard on its own, the disc offers considerable pleasures. Certainly, he has the background for the repertoire. He has recorded, for instance, the bulk of Myaskovsky's piano music – and his experience is evident in his sympathetic return to the Song and Rhapsody , which expertly captures Myaskovsky's characteristically nostalgic striving. Then, too, his long-term familiarity with Stevenson's music (he's one of the rare pianists to have tackled Stevenson's massive Passacaglia on DSCH ; see Paul Rapoport's discussion in Fanfare 27:5)pays high dividends in his pensive reading of the Recitative and Air, originally commissioned to celebrate Shostakovich's 70 th birthday but, in the event, serving as a memorial instead. The other performances, too, are marked by intelligence and solid (if not transcendental) technique.

That said, his slightly dense reading of the Kabalevsky (which he's also recorded before) is no serious competition for Horowitz's or Moiseiwitsch's: His slightly monochromatic playing tends to reduce the musical conversations to a monologue, and his color rarely changes to mirror the changes in harmonic landscape; nor does he have the kind of manic grip necessary to make the finale seem anything but much-diluted Prokofiev. Nor, despite his relentless fury, is Mclachlan's reading of the Shostakovich First as sympathetic to the sonata's off –kilter character as Lilya Zilberstein's. Then, too, for all the eloquence of its ending (the effect of which is shattered by his decision to follow it with the Shchedrin), his generally out going performance of the Shostakovich Second doesn't displace Emil Gilels's classic reading. As for the production: The recording is rather opaque, the instrument is not in tip-top shape, and the choice of the word “Comrades” for the subtitle is misleading in multiple ways (simultaneously suggesting Shostakovich's commitment to the Soviet culture and his closeness to Kabalevsky), but McLachlan's lengthy notes are generally informative.

In sum. Those willing to pick and choose can get superior performances of most of this music elsewhere – but those who opt for this release will be amply rewarded. Cautiously recommended.
Peter J. Rabinowitz