Shostakovich discoveries have been emerging for almost as long as I can remember – from incomplete operas and neglected theatre scores to abandoned fragments and juvenilia, many of them helped along by expert reconstructors and published with illuminating commentaries in the ongoing 150-volume New Shostakovich Edition. Here now are a few more, all contributing to our knowledge of a career as extraordinary for its range as for its depth and the external pressures under which it was produced.

Perhaps the most remarkable item on the new album is Yelabuga Nail, a 10-minute setting for voice and piano of a Yevtushenko poem musing on Marina Tsvetayeva’s suicide. The score has been more than plausibly completed by Alexander Raskatov. Full of denunciatory outrage and pre-echoes of its near-contemporary, the Fifteenth Symphony, this is authentic, bleaker-than-bleak late Shostakovich, fully deserving of performance alongside his definitive Tsvetayeva song-cycle. (Incidentally, in the archives there is also an interesting sketch for a 12-note fugue, which eventually turned into the first setting of that cycle and which would be well worth the attention of would-be completers.) Almost equally striking are the three discarded fragments from The Nose, all very much in the brittle, not-quite-tonal-or-atonal style of the rest of the opera.

Why we should need another recording of Rayok is less clear. Shostakovich’s caustic send-up of speeches made during the 1948 anti-formalist campaign was probably ‘composed’ partly then and partly sometime after 1957 (the information in DG’s booklet is considerably over-simplified). It is compulsory and compelling listening. But there have been several recordings already, and the version here is an arrangement tailor-made for Kremerata Baltica, whose instrumentalists double as the chorus of ‘musical functionaries’. Just one soloist covers all four solo roles – an option sanctioned by the composer, provided the soloist can ‘transform himself’, which is a lot to ask of the sturdy if unhistrionic bass here, Alexei Mochalov.

Of the smaller pieces, the 1931 Impromptu for viola and piano sounds like an arrangement of a number from one of Shostakovich’s theatre pieces of the time, though I believe no such source is actually known. It is played with appropriate soupiness by Nils Mönkemeyer and could make a soothing encore to the late Sonata, or better a prequel, because nothing should soothe that supremely discomfiting swansong.

The Scherzo for piano is a version of the Op 1 orchestral Scherzo in Glazunov-cum-Rimsky style: the work of a richly gifted 13-to-14-year-old. Less known until now – though certainly long since known about – are the three Fugues of 1934. Contemporaneous with the Fourth Symphony, these were the kinds of exercise Shostakovich would periodically knock out when faced with writer’s block. Particularly fascinating here is the A minor Fugue, whose theme Shostakovich smuggled into the finale of the symphony as well as incorporating it into the cycle of 24 Preludes and Fugues. The Fugues and the Scherzo were recorded at Daniil Trifonov’s home during Covid – hence the rather boxy sound (the rest of the disc sounds fine).

The Prelude and Fugue in C sharp minor consists of an unfinished Prelude from the time of that 1950‑51 cycle, recently discovered by Olga Digonskaya (queen of Shostakovich archival researchers) and stylishly completed by Krzysztof Meyer along with a new complementary fugue of his composing. It also figures in Yuliana Avdeeva’s new recording of the complete cycle of Preludes and Fugues for Pentatone (see page 70). In the Forest (possibly 1919) and the Murzilka (possibly 1944) are pleasant footnotes to Shostakovich’s piano output, valuable in this context.

Fairly well known are the Five Pieces for two violins and piano, in Levon Atovmyan’s arrangements: hard to begrudge their inclusion when the performances are as silky smooth and idiomatic as here.