Schnittke's four-movement Sonata is a large-scale work, lasting almost 30 minutes. It is unlikely to persuade anyone who believes that effect counts for more than substance in his music to change their minds. Relatively simple and restrained ideas, for example the second movement's Grieg-like motive, boil up into dissonant explosions that seem emotionally if not structurally disproportionate. But Boris Berman excels at making such escalations seem both inevitable and inescapable. Indeed, with his obvious liking for pianistic melodrama, Berman is better suited to Schnittke than to Stravinsky.
The Serenade in A provides the clearest contrasts between these three pianists. Berman has the best recorded sound, but his instinct is to weigh the music down with deliberate tempos and heavy accents. His ''Cadenza Finala'' is more than a minute longer than Maria Yudina's, and while she is no less aggressive than Berman for much of the time she avoids one of his least happy effects, the excessive bass staccato in the first movement (2'17'' in Berman's performance).
Yudina's Harmonia Mundi recordings were made in 1962 (she lived from 1899 to 1971) and are far too unrefined and freely expressive for most tastes today. Yet as Robert Craft has remarked, she was ''the USSR's most ardent Stravinskian'' in the years when the composer's music was anathema in his native land, and it is precisely for its ardent quality that I find her playing sympathetic.
Peter Serkin (New World Records/Koch International) gives the best account of the Serenade overall. The excessive 'severity' of which I complained in 1987 is less prominent in comparison with Yudina and Berman, although his tendency (or is it mainly the recording?) to veil his tone in legato passages can seem unstylish in this music. I also find his brisk account of the Sonata's slow movement less convincing than Berman's broader reading, although the latter (a minute longer than Serkin's) verges on the laboured in places.
A complicated situation, then. Purely as recording, Berman wins hands down. Otherwise, my advice is to be guided by the couplings, since there at least the differences are clear cut, between Berman's Schnittke, Yudina's Schubert Impromptus, and Serkin's American music (Wolpe and Lieberson).'