With its roots in the tradition of Borodin and Mussorgsky, the music of the Ukrainian- born Soviet composer Yuri Shaporin (1887-1966) sits between the late Romanticism of Skryabin and the harder edges of Shostakovich and Prokofiev, blending a mastery of counterpoint with an acute sense of Russian keyboard colour. In Shaporin’s piano music his fondness for the epic – expressed in two large-scale Sonatas and a mighty Passacaglia – is contrasted with a number of gentle, almost whimsical miniatures. © Toccata Classics