Auerbach: 24 Preludes and Cello Sonata – Aznavoorian

There is something almost defiant about a composer sitting down to record her own music alongside a cellist half her professional generation, and daring the listener to say the results are indulgent. They are not. Lera Auerbach at the keyboard is a formidable partner — not a note-perfect accompanist so much as a co-conspirator who happens to have written the score in blood the first time around.

Auerbach’s 24 Preludes for cello and piano invite the inevitable comparison to Shostakovich’s own set for piano solo, and to Chopin behind him. She doesn’t shy from it. But the lineage that matters more, I think, runs backward through Russian vocal music — Mussorgsky most audibly, in the “Bydlo“-tinged tread that opens Prelude No. 12 — toward something older and stranger, an Old Believer’s sense of lament as ritual. Ani Aznavoorian plays that prelude with a tone so covered, so inward, that when Auerbach’s harmony curdles at the midpoint — I won’t give away the mechanism, only that it works like a lighting change in a Chekhov production, the same room suddenly full of shadows — the effect is genuinely unsettling. Auerbach herself has said elsewhere that she considers No. 16 the emotional center of the cycle. Composers are not always the best judges of their own creations. I’ll take No. 12, and I suspect most listeners will too.

Aznavoorian’s cello has a burnished, slightly husky quality in the middle register that suits this music’s ambiguity — never quite bright, never quite dark. She digs into the unaccompanied preludes (No. 6, with its unmistakable nod to Bach’s solo suites, all implied polyphony and stoic double-stops) without turning them into etudes. The Mozart-derived No. 14, a sly, melancholy gloss on a tune from The Magic Flute, comes off wistful rather than cute. No small feat. And “Dialogo,” No. 21, in which the cello alone converses between its top and bottom registers while the piano sits in silence, had me leaning forward in my chair. It’s a neat structural joke that Auerbach never lets become merely clever.

The Cello Sonata, composed three years after the Preludes, is a tougher nut: twenty minutes of music that begins in near-violence and does not fully forgive itself by the end. The first movement is astringent, full of scraping ponticello and piano writing that clusters and stabs. You sense Bartók somewhere behind the curtain, maybe Crumb too. The slow movement sings its grief more openly, in long-breathed phrases that Aznavoorian shapes with real rubato, unhurried, unafraid of silence. Then comes the finale, marked con estrema intensità, and Auerbach and her cellist take that instruction as gospel. The bow arm churns; the piano hammers; for a moment near the climax I genuinely feared for the E string. It’s thrilling, if not always comfortable, listening.

What saves all this from mere gesture, from the kind of contemporary-music intensity that exhausts more than it moves, is that Auerbach’s language, however chromatic, never abandons tonal gravity entirely. You always know, roughly, where home is, even when she’s furious about visiting it. That grounding lets the anguish register as communication rather than provocation. Call it sincerity, or call it craft. Either way it’s rarer than it should be among composers of her generation.

The three-minute Postlude that closes the disc brings back fragments of that Prelude No. 12 tune, now filtered through a prepared piano that clanks and buzzes like something remembered imperfectly, a music box with a few pins missing. It’s a lovely, understated way to end, quieter than anything else here, and all the more effective for it.

Release quality is close and warm, cello tone captured with enough resin-and-wood grain that you can practically smell the rosin dust. There isn’t a rival version of the complete Preludes I’d reach for instead; this is repertoire Auerbach essentially owns, and having the composer’s hands on the keys settles any interpretive questions before they arise. Strongly, unhesitatingly recommended — to cellists hungry for new repertoire, and to anyone still unconvinced that tonal language has anything left to say in the twenty-first century.