Shostakovich: 24 Preludes & Fugues (live)

In February 2025, Sofia Sacco recorded, on piano, the complete 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87 by Dmitri Shostakovich at the Menuhin Hall. The album was released by Orchid Classics in July 2025. Over four days from December 2024 to April 2025, in parallel with the studio sessions, Sacco filmed the complete cycle for Fly On The Wall live at the Angela Burgess Recital Hall in London, a venue renowned for its beautiful acoustics. With this release, Fly On The Wall presents an archival recording of those sessions for the first time. The studio album was noted for its poetic restraint. The pianist is deeply attuned to the polyphonic architecture of Shostakovich's writing; by attending to the score on its own terms rather than imposing an interpretation upon it, Sacco allows every strand to come through — the brooding poetry of the slower works, the pertness and poise of the lighter pieces. These qualities are strikingly apparent in the live recording, captured in the immediacy of single-take performance.

Sacco has approached Shostakovich with a depth and continuity that few pianists at her career stage have attempted. Trained in Padua and at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where she completed her Master of Arts as a scholarship student of Rustem Hayroudinoff, she has performed across Europe and Asia, with appearances at Teatro la Fenice in Venice, the Gohliser Schlösschen in Leipzig, Pushkin House in London, and on tours of China through Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. She is a Hodgson Fellow and Aud Jebsen Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music, an Artist of the City Music Foundation, and Artist in Residence at the Società del Quartetto di Bergamo, where she will perform Shostakovich's complete piano works in the coming seasons. She made her Wigmore Hall debut in January 2026. Inquisitive across disciplines, she also holds a degree in Physics from the University of Padua.

Shostakovich composed his 24 Preludes and Fugues in Moscow between 1950 and 1951, in the wake of his condemnation under the Soviet regime's anti-formalist decree of 1948. The cycle was inspired by the Leipzig Bach festival of 1950, where Shostakovich heard the young Russian pianist Tatiana Nikolayeva perform Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier; Nikolayeva would give the first complete public performance of his cycle in 1952 and remained its most committed advocate. The work traces a path through all 24 major and minor keys following the progression by ascending fifths used by Chopin in his Op. 28, rather than the chromatic ascent of Bach's WTC, producing a more cohesive tonal arc that returns to its origin at the close. Combining the highest Baroque form with the colour and inflection of Russian folk material, the cycle has come to be recognised as one of the great traversals of the 20th-century keyboard repertoire.

Reviewing the Orchid release, Gramophone noted Sacco's poetic restraint, the lucidity of her textures even in the most demanding fugues, and her command of polyphonic construction. The album was nominated by the German Record Critics' Award in its 2025 long list.

In her booklet essay for the Orchid recording, Sacco describes the cycle as a unified emotional arc rather than a collection of independent pieces, with Prelude and Fugue No. 12 marking the turn from the lighter, more direct character of the first half to the more inward terrain of the second. Of the closing Prelude and Fugue No. 24 she writes that it draws the two halves together into a single resolution, releasing the tension accumulated across the preceding two and a half hours of music. The reading she advances in writing is the reading the live recording realises in performance.