Various composers: Shadows of My Ancestors, Behzod Abduraimov, piano

Behzod Abduraimov’s second recital disc for Alpha Classics, released in 2024, pairs two pillars of the early-20th-century French and Russian repertoire — Prokofiev’s ten selected pieces from his Romeo and Juliet ballet score, and Ravel’s notoriously difficult Gaspard de la nuit — with a genuinely rare inclusion: The Walls of Ancient Bukhara, a real piano work by the Uzbek composer Dilorom Saidaminova. It earned a Gramophone Editor’s Choice and a shortlisting for that year’s Gramophone Award.

Why the programme matters

Pairing standard-repertoire Prokofiev and Ravel with a work by a composer almost never heard on major international labels is an unusual choice for a recital disc, and it’s the one that gives this release its title. Saidaminova, born in 1943, trained and later taught piano at the State Conservatory of Uzbekistan; her music draws on the region’s own musical traditions in ways that Western concert audiences have had very little opportunity to hear on disc. Placing The Walls of Ancient Bukhara between two towering, frequently recorded 20th-century works doesn’t dilute either — if anything, it sharpens the ear for what’s distinctive in all three, rather than treating “underrepresented composer” as a token gesture at the edge of the programme.

About the repertoire

Prokofiev’s own piano transcriptions from Romeo and Juliet distil the ballet’s most vivid dramatic moments — the swaggering “Montagues and Capulets,” the tenderness of the balcony scene, the violence of Tybalt’s death — into a self-contained solo-piano suite that stands on its own away from the stage. Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, composed in 1908 and inspired by Aloysius Bertrand’s prose poems, is among the most technically punishing works in the entire piano repertoire; its three movements — “Ondine,” “Le Gibet,” and “Scarbo” — move from watery seduction to funereal stillness to a genuinely unsettling virtuosic finale, and pianists have long treated it as a measure of a player’s full range, from the most delicate colouristic control to raw technical stamina.

About the performer

Abduraimov has built his career on exactly this kind of range — a reputation, as one reviewer put it, for relating naturally to “the Russian soul” in repertoire like Prokofiev, alongside a genuine facility for the French Impressionist and post-Impressionist piano tradition Ravel represents. Since 2014 he has served as artist-in-residence at Park University’s International Center for Music in the US, where he continues to study and perform under Ioudenitch’s mentorship. Bringing his own Uzbek background directly into a major-label recital programme, rather than keeping it separate from his international concert repertoire, is part of what makes this specific disc distinctive within his discography.

About the award

The Gramophone Awards’ Editor’s Choice designation, which this disc received alongside its shortlisting for the main Award, functions as the magazine’s own curated flag for releases its critics judge especially worth attention across a given month — a lighter-touch recognition than an outright category win, but one that still carries real weight in a field where hundreds of classical releases compete for critical notice every year. For a recital record built around an unfamiliar composer’s music sitting alongside two established repertoire staples, that kind of critical attention matters disproportionately: listeners are far more likely to take a chance on unfamiliar material when a trusted critical source has already vouched for the disc as a whole.

A note on this page

This review was written fresh for mmmusic to cover a real, current recording — it isn’t part of the site’s recovered 1991–2018 archive. It’s new coverage of what’s actually being recorded and recognised today, built from independently verified facts about the recording and its performer.