Like other Russian composers of the 20th century—Alexander Scriabin, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Sergei Prokofiev—Dmitri Shostakovich excelled at the keyboard. He first studied the instrument with his mother at age 9, then continued at Petrograd Conservatory under renowned pedagogue Leonid Nikolayev. According to a friend, Shostakovich “was a wonderful pianist, with strong hands and his own precise and somewhat dry manner of playing.”  

His sporadic but impressive output for the instrument included numerous incidental pieces, a set of 24 preludes, two piano sonatas, and a set of 24 preludes and fugues—the last being a tribute to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Composed during World War II, following the evacuation of Shostakovich and his family to difficult living circumstances in the Volga city of Kuybyshev (now Samara), the Second Piano Sonata is an unusually introspective and “private” piece. Different in spirit from the “aggressively modern” one-movement First Sonata (1926), it also represents a striking contrast to the “public” music Shostakovich was composing around the same time, such as the hugely successful Symphony No. 7, “Leningrad.” 

In the Second Piano Sonata, Shostakovich seems to be composing for himself alone. That the piece was composed as a memorial to his beloved teacher Leonid Nikolayev, who died in late 1942, helps to explain its intimate and melancholy emotional tone. Maxim Shostakovich, the composer’s son and an accomplished pianist and conductor, has called the Second Sonata “one of Shostakovich’s most tragic scores.” 

Most cheerful of the three movements is the opening Allegretto. A study in contrast between flowing 16th-note runs and accented dotted march-like rhythms, it has some of the antic flavor of Shostakovich’s film scores. The following Largo, an impressionistic, hushed, and slow-motion lament, seems more typical of Shostakovich’s later chamber works. In the finale, a wandering theme becomes the subject of remarkably diverse variations, gradually disintegrating into fragments over a mostly steady bass line. If you listen very closely, you can also hear what is considered to be the first fleeting instance of Shostakovich’s personal “signature” D-S-C-H (D, E-flat, C, B), a motif that would reappear in future works as a defiant code of personal identity. —Harlow Robinson