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“I've been looking for (and finding) new all my life.”
(Yudina to Rozhdestvensky)
“She did not like musical clichés. She destroyed them,” this statement about Maria Yudina from one of her friends, the great culturologist Mikhail Bakhtin can be an epigraph to her recordings featured on this release.
“Only Mussorgsky, an ingenious discoverer, a seer, could create a comprehensive and both artistically and spiritually unique work on the basis of Hartmann’s most amusing pictures,” Maria Yudina wrote about the piano cycle Pictures at an Exhibition. The poem about good and evil, life and death, divine grace and distortion of human nature, resurrected in the colors of ancient Russian art – this is how we hear Yudina’s rendition of Pictures at an Exhibition.
The synthesis of Russian national roots with deep spiritual searches of mankind was how Yudina saw the way of Russian (and particularly piano) music from the Mighty Handful to Scriabin, Medtner, Myaskovsky, and her contemporaries Prokofiev and Shostakovich. The “Bachianism” of Glazunov’s late fugues, the strict intellectualism of Taneyev’s ensembles, and Medtner’s philosophical lyricism could not fail to attract her attention. But above all, Yudina was a daughter of her time.
“This century, like other centuries, is in direct relation to God... We must take responsibility for everything that happens in modern musical culture, without shifting this responsibility onto the past”.
Yudina knew Dmitri Shostakovich from her student years. They both studied with Leonid Nikolayev at the Petrograd Conservatory and mutually admired each other’s directness and courage of artistic search. In 1948, after the shameful session of the USSR Union of Composers, when Shostakovich, depressed and lonely, left the auditorium, Yudina greeted him with a bouquet of flowers and words of recognition: “You are a great composer. You are a great musician. You are a great man”.
But among all the peaks of modern music, one seemed unattainable to her – Igor Stravinsky. “All of his scores are written ad magiorem Dei gloriam [for the greater glory of God] and therefore they are unfading for all people”. After the onset of the Thaw, striving to bring the Russian genius back home, she dared to enter into correspondence with him, actively played his works on different stages, and contributed greatly to his arrival in the USSR, for which she organized a large-scale exhibition. “I try to play your compositions as often and well as I can, and I call the others to do the same and, if necessary, teach these others to understand and perform as close to this truth as possible,” she wrote to the composer.
According to Gennady Rozhdestvensky, “Yudina was able to hear, see and feel the sound matter of Stravinsky, penetrating into the innermost secrets of its structure”.
