The two Sonatas play a major role among Dmitri Shostakovich’s piano pieces. Given the great “historical awareness” shown by the composer right from the start and his inevitable respect for the sonata genre, they can rightly be considered as symbols of two distinct creative phases, from the comparison of which it is possible to appreciate the stylistic development of his language. Composed seventeen years apart from each other, the two sonatas seem to have developed with diametrically opposed premises and results: the first one is fierce, dense and atonal; the second one is meditative, rhetorical and calm.

Dmitrij Dmitrievič Shostakovich was one of the most influential, praised and widely performed composers of the twentieth century: his unmistakable style has left an indeli-ble mark on the aesthetic taste of the modern listener and on the DNA of the contempo-rary orchestra. Nevertheless, up to this day, his piano works have been rarely played by performers and listened to by the public, almost obscured by the exceptional nature of his extensive chamber and symphonic production. Considering his outstanding ease of writing and well-proven ability to compose music under all kinds of circumstances – even unfavorable ones –, Shostakovich’s piano pro-duction for piano appears relatively small and, above all, sporadic. These pages are not less extraordinary because of that. On the contrary, many of them show a degree of am-bition and depth of purpose that are not second to those of his chamber and symphonic masterpieces.