Volume 1 / Volume 2 / Volume 3 / Volume 4 / Volume 5 / Volume 6
“…In every piece of music there is Bach,
In each of us there is God.”
These lines written by Joseph Brodsky could be a fitting epigraph to Maria Yudina’s entire concert and pianistic life. Over the course of nearly half a century of her performing career, she was always open to new discoveries and sensitive to the musical worlds of her contemporaries. However, Bach's music remained an indispensable constant of her vast spiritual universe. Moreover, Bach occupied a special, “sacred” place in Yudina’s worldview, along with Kant, Blessed Augustine and the Gospel.
“…Everything falls silent before Bach, for man and the world, man and God enter into the truth of relationship here”, she wrote to a friend.
During the period of “militant atheism” and the most ruthless persecution of religiousness, Yudina, by her own admission, remained “the only one who worked at the piano with the Bible in her hands”. The deep, metaphysical piety of Bach's music, its antinomy of the divine and the human, found a deep response in Maria Yudina’s soul – her life was sanctified by friendship with Fr. Pavel Florensky and Fr. Alexander Men pronounced a eulogy at her memorial service. Her study of Bach was not limited to clavier music. So, she translated the philosophical commentaries to St. Matthew Passion from German, prepared the performance of the cantata Actus Tragicus, and planned to publish selected Bach arias with her own Russian translation. According to one of her closest friends, Mikhail Bakhtin, Yudina was attracted to music “to the limit of the musical and something more sublime, mythological or religious. ... therefore, in music, she took everything that lay on the border of music and other arts”. And only Bach's music could correspond to that absolute.
Contemporaries recalled how the transcriptions of the organ toccatas and fugues sounded under her fingers in chamber halls – “the most powerful of the organs did not sound like that”. During a trip to Germany, she, like a pilgrim, walked through the entire city of Leipzig to Bach’s tomb in St. Thomas Church. Her interpretation of the Goldberg Variations, performed shortly before her death, became an unattainable peak.
The first volume of the Grand Collection of Marina Yudina’s digitally mastered recordings dedicated to her 120th anniversary features her interpretations of Johann Sebastian Bach's music. In addition to the well-known studio recording of The Well-Tempered Clavier, the collection includes concert versions of some of the preludes and fugues, arrangements of the organ works, the Concerto in D minor, the Sonata for violin and clavier, the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, the Goldberg Variations, and Liszt’s Variations on a Theme of B-A-C-H.
Some of the recordings see the light of day for the first time.
