MARIA YUDINA PLAYS BEETHOVEN

Maria Yudina plays Beethoven as he might well have played his own music. We have all read, in the literature about Beethoven, descriptions of the way he played. Suffice it to say, and here I quote Harold Schonberg from his excellent book The Great Pianists from Mozart to the Present Day, "... he would listen to current Beethoven specialists and consider them dry, unmusical and anything but expressive."

[If you want an example of such playing, listen to the Beethoven Sonata recordings of Richard Goode, a proclaimed Beethoven specialist, though I suspect that anyone who performs and records all 32 of the sonatas becomes a defacto Beethoven specialist in our time.]

Beethoven's was wild music and he was, in the context of the late Classical period, a time still of powdered wigs and courtly manners, a wild man. Listen as Yudina Plays Beethoven's so called - and terribly misnamed - Moonlight Sonata, the Presto agitato. This is not music for genteel society and the qualification agitato was not chosen by accident. Beethoven's student, Ferdinand Ries, called his playing "capricious" and "infused with exquisite and inimitable expression". Ries could have been describing the playing of Maria Yudina.

Maria Yudina plays Beethoven as though the simplest turns of phrase, the most seemingly obvious cadences, plumb the depths of meaning and emotion. It is not, in her playing, a matter of excess, rather one of significance. Beethoven was a declamatory composer. He had things to say. All of the notes he wrote were carefully chosen and deserve to be given their due. You will hear that when Yudina plays Beethoven, she simply does exactly that.

Oh, and do take note of the first movement cadenza in the fourth piano concerto. It is by Brahms, and if your mind should wander you may find it a bit disconcerting to wake up in the midst of a piano concerto by Brahms you had no idea existed.

Beethoven  Piano Concerto 4 in G major, Op 58
Kurt Sanderling conducting the Leningrad State Philharmonic Orchestra

recorded in 1948

ia Allegro moderato