Chostakovitch : Les deux concertos pour piano. Melnikov.

Piano International (May, 2012)
In Shostakovich’s First Piano Concerto, says Alexander Melnikov, ‘everything is wrong, yet it is right’, whereas in the Second, ‘everything is right, yet it is wrong’. It is true that the First Concerto (1933), playful, experimental, flouts convention yet retains overall cohesion, and Melnikov conveys these qualities in an assured performance.

His understanding of the Second Concerto (1957) is more contentious: he sees its ‘almost populist simplicity’ as a facade, masking layers of irony and disquiet. Shostakovich’s own swashbuckling recording treats the concerto as a parody of populism – in the first movement’s cartoon-like velocities, for example, or the second movement’s pastiche of Romanticism: in contrast, Melnikov’s performance is very measured, …