This invaluable record—invaluable because it represents Chopin playing of a very high order—celebrates Yulianna Avdeeva’s triumph in the 1910 International Chopin Competition in Warsaw. After achieving second prizes in previous competitions—a bridesmaid rather than a bride, and equally part of the Russian roulette nature of the competition circuit—she went on to join other celebrated winners including Pollini, Argerich and Zimerman and gain a richly deserved reward.
Her programme is devoted to Chopin’s later works, all of them examples of his art at its most elevated and in the final stage of his glory. And unlike, say, Mitsuko Uchida, who once confessed to me that she would only record late Chopin after she had learnt the Polish language(a recording that never came to pass), Avdeeva takes on a supreme musical challenge, telling us in her accompanying essay as well as in her playing of her overwhelming joy in her assignment; of placing part of a memorable if ephemeral occasion permanently on record. Like Cortot she allows herself verbal comments which while unfashionable in today’s severe musical climate, are far beyond mere asides. How refreshing to read not just of her stress on the complex polyphonic nature of Chopin’s writing, but also that ‘Chopin has a unique place in my soul,’ that he achieves ‘layers of emotion.’ Such unapologetic feeling suggests a radical difference to those who use Chopin for self-serving, outwardly glamorous glory, who place performer above composer.
Fanciful to the end, Avdeeva speaks of the Scherzo from the Third Sonata as like ‘a fire-fly in mid flight’( reminding you, perhaps, of James Huneker’s delight in music ‘as light as a hair-bell’), of the way the Largo ends in ‘a look towards eternity.’ Again, for her the opening of the Polonaise-Fantasie is ‘like a night sky full of stars.’ Music may be too precise rather than too vague for language(Mendelssohn) but I am grateful for such undiluted love and affection.
And now to the actual playing and performances of a special poetic refinement that captures the classic twin sides of Chopin’s nature, the gallic and the Slavonic. Avdeeva launches the fiercely rhetorical opening gesture of the Third Sonata( the principle work in her programme) in truly ‘maestoso’ style, yet there is no forcing of the issue. And if her colour and nuance are sometimes subtle to the point of being almost imperceptible, they are always there. In the Scherzo her flawless technique never seeks to dazzle with speed and facility, only with musical quality. Again, both her manner (what painters call ‘low in tone’} and her fine-spun sonority make you aware of an essential difference between Chopin and Liszt.
In the two opus 62 Nocturnes she shares Rubinstein’s art of encompassing rhythmic and harmonic piquancy within an unfailing sense of line, impetus and continuity. In the first in B major she captures all of the openings daring resolution(too advanced for Chopin’s contemporaries to fathom) and reminds you with what I can only describe as a contained ecstasy that this miraculous work was composed within the sound of the nightingales that haunted George Sand’s estate in Nohant. In the Poloaise-Fantasie everything is held and expressed but never exaggerated. Her lucidity in music that once caused Frederick Nieks,the early Chopin scholar, to claim that the Polonaise-Fantasie ‘stands outside the realm of art on account of its psychological content’ is among her chief assets. In the Barcarolle, too, there is that naturalness, that distilling of the endless ebb and flow of Chopin’s interior and emotional life.
Finally there are the three opus 59 Mazurkas, complex and insinuating, as much as anything a key part of Cho[in’s most intimate diary.
Yulianna Avdeeva has been finely recorded. Artists of such natural quality and calibre are rare and I greatly look forward to hearing her in further Chopin and hopefully in many other composers.
Bryce Morrison