Her overtly spiritual manner, uncompromising repertoire and refusal to kowtow to authority gave Maria Yudina a saintly aura unique in the annals of Soviet pianism. Yet it is wishful thinking to suggest that anything more than a pale reflection of that aura survives on these particular recordings. They all have conspicuous shortcomings, and even their greatest strengths have been surpassed by others.
A severe, totally unpedalled rendition of the ‘Aria’ accurately prophesies the character of Yudina’s Goldberg Variations, while the change of acoustic for the first variation similarly announces the primitive technology of the Melodiya recording. According to Shostakovich in Solomon Volkov’s Testimony, she conceived the work as a series of illustrations to the Bible. Yet that rarely translates into anything remarkable in her actual playing. Even the celebrated 25th Variation, where it’s surely reasonable to expect to be transported, remains plain-speaking and largely indifferent to Bach’s mystical chromaticism. All the same, there’s an unvarnished, stripped-to-essentials integrity to the performance, and I can imagine turning to it as an antidote to more suavely glamorous readings.
Yudina is certainly alive to the visionary quirkiness of the Diabelli Variations and the grittiness of the Eroica set. But there are serious obstacles to more detailed enjoyment, including a seriously out-of-tune instrument in both cases. And is it an idiosyncratic attitude to the text or simply a poor edition that is responsible for the occasional missing bars, added bars, phrases in the wrong clef, and more than occasional approximations of dynamic and articulation? Most surprising to me is what seems to be a stilted response to inwardly exploratory pieces such as the 31st of the Diabellis, while the final transfigured minuet also seems more perfunctory than revelatory. The most technically demanding variations are generally admirable but unremarkable by today’s standards.
Ideally I suppose these performances have to be approached in a similar frame of mind to that of Yudina’s worshipful Soviet audiences, who were fed a diet of lies in their day-to-day lives and were consequently hungry for eternal truths. Take her music-making as a luxury item for aesthetic enjoyment in the 1990s and it falls well short. Recall its sociological context and it suddenly seems crucially important. '