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“You can despise, hate and curse me,
but I renounce Beethoven. For I still don’t dare to play him –
I can look at the stars and planets, but I go blind when I face the Sun,
and when I’m blind, I can’t play and I don’t dare to”.
Maria Yudina
The second volume of the Grand (digital) Collection of Maria Yudina’s recordings is dedicated to the Viennese classical repertoire – piano music by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.
It is difficult to single out just one mainline in the multidimensional space of Yudina’s performing interests. Notwithstanding her unconditional Bachianism and her very keen interest in all things new and modern, classical romantic piano music always was the foundation of Yudina’s repertoire.
Viennese classical music traditionally forms the core of academic pianism. It is a different matter when the hands of a truly great Musician touch the keys, and then the hackneyed masterpieces are born anew. This is exactly what happened at Maria Yudina’s recitals.
Any kind of “yesterday's” or museum art didn’t exist for her: Yudina interpreted the Viennese classics with all their poignant contradictions and tragic conflicts of being. She interpreted even the harmonious idyll of Mozart’s sonatas as an unattainable illusion of beauty and accompanied the music with contemporary poets’ verses in her performances. And what a vast universe opened in the world of Mozartian melancholy, in the C minor piano concerto and in the slow movement of the A major one! It is not without reason that such a stable and yet unconfirmed legend of “the pianist and the tyrant” (Stalin once heard Yudina on the radio, ordered to make a record, and awarded her in a “royal” way only to receive a fearless letter in response) is connected precisely with Yudina’s Adagio from the piano concerto.
And yet, she gave pride of place to Beethoven. Just like Bach, he was one of the creators of the world’s musical universe to Yudina. Her “way to Beethoven” was long and difficult, but that might be the reason why her interpretations of the late-period sonatas, large-scale variation cycles and the Fourth and Fifth concertos, with all their controversy, had a magnetic, inexplicable power over the audience. This power is still there, heard through all the technical flaws of the imperfect live recordings.
The sounds of one of Beethoven’s symphonies were an unexpected, but a symbolic conclusion of the civil funeral service for Maria Yudina that took place in the lobby of the Grand Hall of the Conservatory. The philharmonic orchestra was rehearsing upstairs. Vera Gornostayeva recalled that “...all the musicians with their instruments in hands, driven by their hearts, came down, arranged chairs between the columns, sat down and played. They played the Seventh Symphony...”
