专辑简介

Recorded: 1947 (1-4); 1952 (5); 1951-1952 (6-13)

by James Manheim

The reissue of a group of 1940s and 1950s performances by pianist Maria Yudina on Russia's Vista Vera label has revealed a fearless artist as yet little known in the West. Yudina's Bach and Beethoven performances are both unusual and profound. These performances of Schubert and Schumann, however, though they certainly qualify as fearless, are not among the stronger entries in the series. The central work on the disc is Schubert's Piano Sonata in B flat major, D. 960. Although this is one of the earliest Yudina performances in the series, dating from 1947, the sound is clearer than in some of the earlier releases. The problem is that Yudina's interpretations, which everywhere tend toward extreme subjectivity, here fall almost into the category of fantasias based on Schubert rather than performances of Schubert's music. Sample the very beginning of the disc, which Schubert would hardly have recognized as his own work: Yudina eases into the music with a long accelerando that is both unidiomatic and diminishes the impact of the highly dramatic ways Schubert manipulates this opening material later on in the movement. The ominous low trill in the left hand, which in its first appearance is marked to be played quietly and is in the nature of an incidental remark that will assume greater importance later on, is played forte by Yudina. And so it goes in the other movements; the Andante sostenuto is deeply expressive (as are Yudina's performances of Beethoven's slow movements), but there are many moments that can only be termed idiosyncratic and destructive of Schubert's elaborate architectural thinking. The short pieces by Schumann at the end of the program are similarly extreme -- less distracting in these brief Romantic utterances than in Schubert's heavenly length, but still jarring in spots. Nothing Yudina does is uninteresting, and buyers investigating Vista Vera's fine series may well wish to have this disc, but it is paradoxical that this arch-Romantic artist seems to have done least well with these central texts of musical Romanticism.