“…Sergei Dogadin and Nikolai Tokarev offer a different take on the Violin Sonata, broader than usual in the later movements. We can’t be sure Shostakovich would have approved—he raced through his own oeuvre nervily and at speed—but their music-making is carefully considered rather than maximally intense. The cheerier Preludes are given in Dmitry Tsyganov’s arrangements plus five realised more recently by the Russian-American polymath Lera Auerbach. Where older recordings tended to present Tsyganov’s 19 transcriptions in his own sequence, this one restores the original order of Shostakovich’s Op 34 set.”