Kim Kashkashian introduces a duo with Russian composer-pianist Lera
Auerbach. Their first collaborative recording features Auerbach’s viola
and piano version of Dmitri Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes op. 34, and Auerbach’s own, darker, sonata for viola and piano, Arcanum.
The musicians first met at Switzerland’s Verbier Festival in 2010,
although Auerbach had long been aware of Kashkashian’s recordings, and
the “quality of life-or-death-intensity to her performing, which is rare
and wonderful.” Arcanum, accordingly, was written for
Kashkashian. Its title, the composer explained in a recent interview,
“means ‘mysterious knowledge’: I was fascinated by the inner voice
within each of us, some may call it perhaps intuition, some maybe guided
meditation, but there is some knowledge that we have, which we may not
necessarily verbalize or rationalize. This knowledge allows us to see
the truth, to be guided, to seek answers.”
Of Auerbach’s roles as composer and performer in this programme, Kim
Kashkashian notes that “Lera performs any piece of music as if she had
composed it: she has a way of understanding the perspective of a piece
of music, its structure, its character and the colors that go with it.”
Dmitri Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes for piano (1933) gained
renewed popularity through Dmitri Tsyganov’s transcriptions of some of
them for violin and piano. Lera Auerbach first turned her attention to
violin/piano transcriptions of the preludes Tsyganov had not reworked.
In 2008, she set the full cycle for cello and piano, two years later
creating a version for viola and piano intended, she said, as a
contrasting partner piece to the Sonata for Viola and Piano op 147,
Shostakovich’s sombre last work. “This way, violists could enjoy both
sides of Shostakovich. The journey through the 24 Preludes
gives so much opportunity for colours, for experimentation of different
characters, for humour – there is a lot of humour in these Preludes.” (ECM Records)
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