Recorded: 1951 (8); 1952 (1-4, 9, 11, 14); 1966 (12); 1968 (5-7, 10, 13) by James Manheim Russian vaults have yielded some remarkable performances ever since commercial labels have been allowed to have at them, but few have been as remarkable as this one by Maria Yudina, who studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and suffered mightily under Communism after adopting the Russian Orthodox faith. According to the booklet notes (in Russian and stilted yet vocabulary-flaunting English -- "zetetic," anyone?) she lived in poverty, wearing the same dress for years on end, but did not object because she believed that artists ought to be poor. The recordings here were made at various times in the 1950s and 1960s, toward the end of her life, but the performance of the Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 29 in B flat major, Op. 106 ("Hammerklavier"), is an integral set. And it is superb -- as distinctive and compelling as any ever made of this notoriously troublesome work, whose sheer technical difficulty tends to imbue it with a certain Olympian standoffishness. Those pianists who catch the moods of the other late sonatas may be thrown by this one, which displays the aging Beethoven's occasional propensity for writing music at the edge of human capabilities (the soprano part of the Ninth Symphony finale being another example). Yudina succeeds not because she had any really extraordinary technical gifts -- she gave herself room here by taking tempos slightly on the slow side. (Apparently, before going on-stage to play this work, Yudina was heard to mutter, "Oh, God, why on earth does one condemn oneself to such torments?") Her brilliance, rather, is interpretive. Where the vast majority of other pianists have made the opening movement both monumental and a bit brittle, Yudina treats it instead with freedom -- almost with an improvisatory quality, as annotator Marina Drozdova points out. Yudina pushes a few of Beethoven's interpretive markings to the edge but not beyond, and the effect is extraordinary -- she finds an emotionalism in the work that few others have detected, and allies it with the dramatic qualities of the Symphony No. 9. Her slow movement, likewise, is not a chilly hall of despair with half-rays of sunshine poking through dusty windows, but rather a magnificent long-breathed plaint; she lays great emphasis on the varied repetition of the opening theme where it takes on the mysterious anticipation of swing rhythms that sometimes appear in late Beethoven. The impact of the final fugue where the personal becomes irrevocably impersonal, is heightened to the point where the opening section, with its snatches of polyphony emerging out the gloom, takes on an almost unbearable nervous energy. The various Brahms intermezzi included here are more of a mixed bag, overwhelming structure with feeling to some degree, and the early-'50s sound of the Beethoven is rather tinny (although better than on other discs in the series and not bad for its time and place). None of it matters, for here is great and unknown Beethoven playing.