The survival and even revival of Dmitry Kabalevsky's music is especially impressive in view of his status as an "establishment" figure in the Soviet musical system, with a conservative style and an attitude toward progressive musical thought that ranged from indifferent to actively hostile. In the West he is mostly known for the suite The Comedians and a few cello works, but his technically challenging piano music is finding new favor on recital programs. The preludes and fugues recorded here might be assumed to be connected with Kabalevsky's career as an educator. They're dutifully rooted in a sort of amorphously Russian Romantic language, topped off with allusions to folk melodies. On top of this, the 24 Preludes, Op. 38, composed (amazing as it may seem) in 1943 and 1944, faced the model of
Shostakovich's own 24 Preludes of about a decade earlier. Given all these strikes against them, Kabalevsky's essays in this classic form are remarkably listenable and varied, with distinctive ways of integrating Russian material into the abstract framework of a key-ordered prelude set or a group of preludes and fugues. Much of the credit goes to Brazilian-Russian-American pianist
Alexandre Dossin, who effectively sets out an almost neutral base from which the more pianistic pieces then seem to branch out. Although there's an academic quality to this music, one can imagine any number of situations that might make pianists want to get to know it; for a program tracing the evolution of the prelude idea over the centuries, it would have something to add.