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Shi-An Costello Does It Differently

Jed Distler

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Glenn Gould’s infamous remark to the effect that the only excuse for recording a piece is to do it differently appears to be Shi-An Costello’s credo, his mantra, and his modus operandi. Hell, let’s be honest, it’s also his gimmick. Costello doesn’t just mix and match preludes and fugues by Bach and Shostakovich, he also links them with fragments from the Book 1 C major fugue. At the end he concocts a kind of mashup blending the Book 1 and Shostakovich C major preludes. Did I mention that he slips in Schumann’s Träumerei at the recital’s midway point?

The pianist begins by playing Bach’s Book 1 C major prelude and fugue beautifully and straightforwardly. He next plays the prelude twice as fast, with a few rhetorical gearshifts at the end, followed by the fugue’s first 13 measures, twice as slowly as before. As soon as Costello arrives at the cadence in A minor, he suddenly dovetails into the Shostakovich A minor prelude, where his fleet and facile fingers lack that last degree of evenness one hears from such pianists as Jenny Lin and Konstantin Scherbakov in this work.

After the prelude, Costello picks up the Bach C major fugue’s thread from measures 14 through 19, replacing the cadence on D major with, you guessed it, the Shostakovich D major prelude and fugue. Although I prefer elegant briskness in the prelude (à la Peter Donohoe’s miraculously-voiced recording), Costello pays uncommon attention to the left-hand countermelody. His dulcet touch and minute dynamic gradations in the fugue evoke the critical cliché that I often get busted for overusing: “ear candy”. Of course the fugue’s final F-sharp links up to the Bach C major fugue’s F-sharp on the third beat of measure 19. Measure 24, beat two, lands on a C-seventh chord, which is the dominant of the tonic F major chord at the outset of…(drumroll, please!)…Träumerei! Costello crawls through the Schumann on life support, but revives (sort of) in time to wrap up his slow-motion Bach fugue.

Now comes Glenn Gould imitation time with the Book 2 B minor prelude and fugue. Costello plays the prelude as normally as you’d expect from a talented first round competition hopeful. The subsequent fugue is jam packed with bouncy detaché articulation. Costello reprises the prelude loudly and vehemently, while his slow-motion fugue “do over” seems endless. Costello eases his way into the Book 2 C major prelude, then offers three distinct interpretations of the fugue back to back to back.

I don’t like Costello’s flippantly clipped (or should I say “clippantly flipped?”) Shostakovich C major prelude. It’s followed by the same composer’s A minor prelude that we heard earlier, but super-slow this time. In turn, the A minor glides right into the second half of the Book 1 C major fugue. I have to say that I’m intrigued by Costello’s DJ-oriented approach to program building and quasi-cinematic transitions, although his interpretive choices become more obvious and predictable as the 51-minute-long program unfolds. He can go further and wilder with this concept. In fact, he should. I’ll be listening.

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Recording Details:

Album Title: Rounded Binary
Reference Recording: None for this collection

J.S. Bach: Selected Preludes & Fugues; Dmitri Shostakovich: Selected Preludes & Fugues; Robert Schumann: Träumerei

    Soloists: Shi-An Costello (piano)

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