In this edition of the program we’ll be talking about the great 20th century
Russian pianists Maria Yudina and Vladimir Sofronitsky.
They both studied with the famous Conservatory Professor Leonid Nikolayev,
played their graduation exams on May 13, 1921, and, getting top marks both,
became the last “Laureates of the St.Petersburg-Petrograd Conservatory.”
Yudina was 21 and Sofronitsky had just celebrated his 20th birthday...
Maria was a tall young woman with a shock of long curly hair. She was not
a beauty in the classical  meaning
of the word, but was all about intelligence, goodwill and a noble heart…
Vladimir, for his part, was the ultimate aristocrat, with finely chiseled
features, an inspired profile, the gait of a thoroughbred and a nimbus
of slightly curling hair around his head…
Yudina and Sofronitsky looked very different just like their musical aspirations.
That difference cropped out already during the conservatory exams. Maria
Yudina played Bach, Beethoven and contemporary music and that was exactly
what she played all her life…
Sofronitsky focused entirely on the music by the all-time romantics Chopin,
Schumann and Scriabin and it also so happened that these were the composers
he played his entire life…
A devoted believer, Yudina, who was of Jewish origin, embraced Orthodoxy
at the age of 20. “Art is the only way to God I know of,” she said. She
was always looking for the underlying idea in everything she played. “The
lack of thought and content in playing is a sin which you can’t disguise
even with sentimentality people love so much these days,” she wrote.
Her playing was really big but she never tried to embellish it with a riot
of sonic colorations, always sticking to the black-and-white contrast.
“I was holding out for the more irrational timbres because I hate luscious
tones,” she admitted. “It was dry, thumping sounds my mind was looking
for…”
By contrast, Sofronitsky was always going for lush colors. Sometimes it
seemed that notes he played were exuding light, maybe even fragrances.
His poetic playing, always so a-changing and whimsical,
invariably captivated the audiences with its fleeting, improvisation-like
unpredictability…
Sofronitsky treated the piano as if it were a living creature, caressed
and kissed it saying “you’ve got to love the piano the way you can’t any
human being anywhere…” And each note he played was so full of love…
To Yudina, the piano was a means of expressing her innermost emotions,
which bordered on self-sacrifice…
All her life she went against the official grain fighting against all odds.
In a country where atheism was a state policy, she kept believing in God
and never made any secret of her religious preferences. That was
why she was rarely allowed to play abroad and was often prevented from
playing big venues even in her own country. That’s way she was fired from
the Petrograd, Tbilisi and Moscow conservatories and also from the Gnessins
Music College in Moscow. One can only wonder how this courageous
and indomitable woman managed to carry on…
Shortly after his graduation from the Conservatory, Vladimir Sofronitsky
went on his first foreign tour, which also happened to be his last… He
enjoyed big kudos in Warsaw and Paris sending people on their feet applauding
uproariously to one of the very hard-to-find players who appear combine
impeccable technique with hot-rod emotionality that immediately turns one’s
soul all around…
Sofronitsky toured Russia extensively during the 1920s and 30s building
up a whole army of devoted followers, more than any other Russian pianist
could ever boast…
He kept playing also during the war years giving concerts in his beloved
city, which in the winter of 1941 found itself besieged by the invading
Nazis. Freezing and starving, Leningrad never bowed to the enemy. “The
air temperature in the hall was a freezing minus 3 degrees and people were
sitting in their fur coats,” Sofronitsky later recalled. “I was playing
in gloves my fingers sticking out but I played so well that night and the
people, they were one the best audiences I’ve ever had…”
Maria Yudina also played in the besieged Leningrad. The first time she
came there was in February 1943 and she came there again in the summer
spending four months playing concerts and giving radio performances.
Yudina was always preoccupied with what happening right at the moment she
was playing. She wanted to hear the voice of her time and speak that voice.
“Old music is like a museum to me,” she said. “You should live and play
the music of the time you live in…” And play it she did inviting the wrath
of the no-nonsense Soviet culture officials who denounced everything they
did not understand or which contradicted their ideological maxims….
The Soviet system, out to destroy individuality, crippled the lives of
many outstanding artists. Finding himself in his much-disliked Moscow right
after the war, Vladimir Sofronitsky was increasingly walling himself in
from the outside world. During the Fifties he lived like a recluse giving
lessons at home and playing occasional concerts in the tiny hall of the
Alexander Scriabin museum. There he could allow himself the liberty of
walking out on stage wearing an ordinary suit and play negligently, slurring
his riffs… Then, all of a sudden, he would play an encore that was so brilliant,
so astoundingly perfect that people will forever admire these occasional
flashes of perfection as their most heart-moving revelations…
Maria Yudina was among those who were following Sofronitsky’s career with
loving attention. She was heartbroken seeing him playing so little
and in August 1961 she bitterly mourned his early demise… She too was playing
rarely during her ebbing years. Not because she refused to play but because
she was prevented from doing so by the authorities. She looked strange
on stage donning a clumsy-looking black gown instead of the traditional
concert dress and wearing old, down-at-heel, shoes. The moment she started
playing, however, she came alive passionately communicating with the audience…
Maria Yudina often defied the established playing traditions and sometimes
even the authors’ opinion too. It made some people angry, of course, but
to all others her interpretations were like a gulp of fresh air and, at
the same time, an example of professional devotion and musical vision…
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