Program Note

Vladimir Ryabov’s Fantasy in C minor (1983) was written in memory of Maria Yudina (1899-1970), a legendary artist in Russia who is becoming increasingly better known internationally thanks to a recent release of her extensive recorded legacy on CD, spanning almost the entire piano literature from Bach to Stravinsky (although she was also the first to perform Boulez and Stockhausen in Russia).

In her own lifetime, Yudina was not allowed to travel to the West, and was fired from both the Moscow Conservatory and the Gnessin school because of her deep religiosity. A true intellectual institution in Russia, she was close friends with some of the greatest literary luminaries of her time; Pasternak first read his novel Dr. Zhivago at her house. Never afraid to speak up against the Communists and to openly affirm her faith, she was a black sheep under the regime; yet she miraculously escaped harm, in one of those strange—and in this case, fortunate—quirks which were not rare in the history of Stalinism. When she received the Stalin Prize, she donated the money to the Orthodox Church for “perpetual prayers for Stalin’s sins.” Yet this devout Christian woman happened to be the former seminary student’s favorite pianist. According to an oft-repeated story, Stalin was so taken with her performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in A major that he demanded a copy of the recording. No one dared tell him that it had been a live broadcast and there was no recording; so they had to summon Yudina to the studio in the middle of the night where, with a hastily assembled orchestra, they recorded the concerto. The next morning, the Great Leader and Teacher was presented with a unique copy. After Stalin’s death, this record was found next to his bed—it was apparently the last thing he had ever listened to.

In his twenty-minute Fantasy, Ryabov (b. 1950), a pianist-composer who had studied with Aram Khachaturyan, managed to say something new and personal, even though his idiom that is strongly indebted to 19 th-century Romanticism. Ryabov accomplished this by devising an approach to harmony in which he added upper and lower neighbors to the tones of traditional chords, creating rich, cluster-like sonorities in which the original harmonies are, nevertheless, still recognizable. The formal outline of the piece is also unusual: the five sections of the fantasy are marked Introduction—Sonata I—Marcia funebre—Sonata II—Capriccio. Allusions to the classics abound, from Bach to Mozart to Beethoven to Schumann to Mussorgsky and beyond. The rather extraordinary fugue theme that appears in the second sonata was composed by Yudina herself, at age 18 in 1917; Ryabov used this theme to create the most shattering climax in the entire work.

The tempos and textures of the fantasy are extremely diverse; powerful chordal moments alternate with episodes filled with rapid passagework. The central funeral march is based on a stark rhythmic figure, to be played “like timpani,” against silently depressed chords in the right hand that release a set of otherworldly overtones. In the words of Italian critic Ettore Bruck, who didn’t hesitate to proclaim the Fantasy to be one of the summits of 20 th-century piano literature, the work unites “extraordinary power and great tenderness, clarity and enigma, a strong will and intense trepidation, a fleeting moment and all eternity.” Everything in this work, Bruck writes, happens “for the first, but also for the last time.” In the concluding Capriccio, Ryabov, in Bruck’s words, “reconciled Harmony and Chaos.” This is no ordinary Capriccio; like the Brahms capriccios, it plumbs extraordinary depths as it goes to the limits of the piano’s expressive possibilities. The ending sounds almost like a hallucination: Ryabov creates a completely new sound world in which an eerie and ominous perpetual-motion figure is punctuated by a series of individual pitches above and below. The musical material seems to disintegrate completely, leaving us with feelings of hopelessness and despair as the music fades into silence.

Peter Laki
Visiting Associate Professor, Bard College