Resilience Prokofiev: Piano Sonata No. 8; Shostakovich: Piano Sonata No. 1; Szpilman: Mazurka; Suite ‘The Life of the Machines’; Weinberg: Piano Sonata No. 4 Yulianna Avdeeva (piano) Pentatone PTC 5187 073 74:04 mins
Courageous and outspoken in her views on the war in Ukraine, the Russian pianist Yulianna Avdeeva certainly displays resilience. She was the 2010 winner of the Chopin Competition, and her connections to Polish music are reflected in this new release. Her liner notes tell of her friendship with the family of Władysław Szpilman, whose memoir was the basis for the film The Pianist, and whose nostalgic 1942 Mazurka opens the album. Few of Szpilman’s pre-war scores survive, and the modernist energy of his Life of the Machines suite, dating from 1933, documents a (slightly) more carefree time. Its final ‘Toccatina’ is fleetingly brittle, yet Avdeeva finds music in his machines.
Avdeeva has performed much Mieczysław Weinberg, whose Piano Sonata No. 4 is a rewarding work with a consoling Adagio. By 1955, when he wrote it, the Polish-born composer had been in Moscow for 12 years, enduring arrest and the assassination of his father-in-law, that famous man of the theatre Solomon Mikhoels. Weinberg’s great friend Shostakovich is represented by his Sonata No. 1, written in 1926 at a time of uncertainty in which Shostakovich was breaking through as a composer. But the biggest score is Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 8, the last and the longest of his three ‘war sonatas’. If Avdeeva is less fierce or aggressive than some interpreters, she commands everything, bringing structural clarity and carrying the work towards an exhilarating close.
John Allison