Virtuoso jazz in classical form: Nikolai Kapustin (b. 1937) is an excellent jazz pianist arranger and composer. His piano sonatas are now published by Schott Music for the first time. Suitable for pianists looking for technically demanding pieces between modern and jazz music which sound like highly skilled yet notated improvisation. Kapustin's monumental set of Preludes and Fugues Op.82 completed in 1997 may well be the most important work written for piano in the genre since Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier and Shostakovich's 24 Preludes and Fugues Op.87. In this sprawling collection Kapustin combines his complete mastery of jazzidioms with a thorough assimilation of contrapunctal techniques like canon imitation inversion and augmentation. Ingenuously each prelude and fugue pair share their motivic material.
