Fernanda Damiano – Shostakovich and Pupils Vol. 1 (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 53:07 minutes | 433 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Piano Classics
The first volume in an adventurous new series juxtaposing the piano music of Shostakovich with his most talented pupils.
As a teacher at the Moscow Conservatoire for many years, Shostakovich trained a generation of the Soviet Union’s most talented composers. He was renowned for a sharp ear and kindly criticism which immediately focused its attention on areas of weakness in a score without requiring that his pupils follow his own path. Indeed, all three of the younger composers here demonstrate the individuality of their own voice.
Least known of them now is German Galynin (1922-1966) whose originality caused him to suffer far more than his teacher from the effects of Zhdanov’s famous ‘purge’ of 1948 directed towards composers and against modernist tendencies in music. In 1951, the year in which he paradoxically obtained the Stalin Prize for his Epic Poem on Russian Themes, Galynin began suffering from schizophrenia that he was admitted to an asylum, and continued to received psychiatric care for the rest of his short life. He wrote this five-movement Suite in 1945, while still a student at the Conservatoire, and it alternates somewhat prophetically between moods of mania and melancholy.