Resilience
Władysław Szpilman (1911-2000)
Mazurek
Suite ‘The Life of Machines’
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Piano Sonata No.1 Op12
Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-1996)
Piano Sonata No.4 in B minor Op56
Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)
Piano Sonata No.8 in B flat major Op84
Yulianna Avdeeva (piano)
rec. 2020/21, Teldex Studios, Berlin
Reviewed as a digital download from a press preview
Pentatone PTC5187073 [73]
This recording begins with a piece of music which truly set my mind reeling. How, it asks, would a piece sound if you weren’t allowed to play Chopin and had to invent your own version of Chopin? Such is the origin of Władysław Szpilman’s Mazurek. The ban obviously came as a result of the Nazi occupation and the pianist composer’s Jewishness. It is the intimacy of the effect of this inhumanity that shocks even when we think we have learnt all there is to learn about the Holocaust. Imagine being a musician and having Chopin taken from you? That sense of intimacy is compounded by the fact the pianist in this recording Yulianna Avdeeva received the piece, previously unknown, in manuscript form from the composer’s family. Such is the fragility of human life and of music.
The other Szpilman piece included in this recital disc, appropriately named Resilience, came into Avdeeva’s hands in the same fashion but is a very different kind of piece. It has all the motor rhythms and zany iconoclasm of that cocky generation of bright young things that followed Stravinsky’s tearing up of the classical music rule book. Szpilman was the inspiration for the award-winning film The Pianist and Avdeeva points out in her liner notes this particular piece evokes with poignancy the composer he might have become if the tragedy of the Second World War hadn’t set his career on a wholly different course.
As a recital this mixes the unknown (Szpilman) with the very well known (Prokofiev’s Sonata No.8), the starting to become better known (Weinberg) with the less well known by a very well-known composer (Shostakovich’s first sonata). For three of the composers included the resilience required of them was a product of Soviet Communism. The Prokofiev is one of his wartime works but as with Shostakovich’s compositions of this era, there is more than a hint that the totalitarianism being resisted isn’t limited to the invading Nazis.
What unites them all is a sense of outrageously gifted young composers whose art was darkened by the times through which they lived. This is certainly the case even In Shostakovich’s brilliant but brittle, occasionally savage first sonata. This is given a sensational outing by Avdeeva. The neurotic tension she finds in the music clearly telling us that all is not well in the workers’ paradise.
Weinberg’s music has been getting the attention it deserves in recent years with recordings of his music shifting from specialist outfits to the big labels. If nothing else, he provides a crucial link between Shostakovich to people like Schnittke and Gubaidulina. This era in Soviet is chronically under appreciated with the music of Edison Denisov and Ustvolskaya neglected almost completely so any move which brings its richness before the listening public is most welcome. And performances as good as this one are doubly so. There is a nervous energy which unites all the music included and the Weinberg is shot through with a sense of suppressed agitation.
When I first saw the track listing of this recording, I sighed with exasperation at the inclusion of Prokofiev’s sonata No.8, a piece that really doesn’t need a helping hand so often is it included in concert programmes and on albums. I needn’t have worried as it both fits perfectly alongside the other pieces and is a terrific, rhapsodic traversal of the work. I liked the way Avdeeva downplayed the wartime links. This is no soundtrack to the Great Patriotic War. There is great poetry and a lot of play of light and shade in her conception of it.
The oddness of the first movement is vividly realised in her hands. It feels more like a dream that hovers between the wonderful and the disturbing than anything more forthright. Avdeeva never allows it to settle or resolve itself. Avdeeva takes the technical demands in her stride but without ever breaking this dreamlike mood. The big climaxes seem more like lamenting voices rather than the usual thunderous incursions of external forces. More the agonies of the people than oncoming panzers. Prokofiev’s debt to Scriabin is clearly audible. There is a lot of heavyweight competition in this piece so I was very pleased to see Avdeeva sidestep it and go her own way. If I were to nitpick I guess I would have liked a little bit more finger bending fury at the sonata’s close but even this seems at one with Avdeeva’s more poetic conception of the work.
With any themed collection my first question is always does it make musical sense as a recital. The answer with Resilience is an unequivocal Yes regardless of what one makes of the theme. Avdeeva reveals herself as pianist of great insight and dexterity, poetry and passion.
David McDade
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