Resilience

Władysław Szpilman, whose memoir of surviving the Nazi occupation of Warsaw became the 2002 triple-Oscar winning film, The Pianist, has inspired Yulianna Avdeeva’s latest album, Resilience. As Avdeeva tells Apple Music Classical, “in September 2020 Szpilman’s family asked me to perform on his house piano—it was a unique opportunity to come closer to this inspiring personality. So, the idea for this recording was born, with Szpilman’s music providing the frame for this album which explores how he and other composers have faced times of great instability.” Resilience features two of Szpilman’s works: the modernist yet humorous 1933 suite The Life of the Machines, long thought lost but rediscovered in 2000; and a poignant mazurka, consciously written in Chopin’s style in 1942 to circumvent the Nazi ban on performing that composer’s music. Both pieces, Avdeeva argues, are relevant to our troubled times: “Delving into Szpilman’s music deeply resonated within me, and I realised that when all my coping mechanisms were exhausted, my resort was to reflect about difficult situations through the language of music.” To complement the Szpilman works, Avdeeva includes three great sonatas which likewise “offer various ways of overcoming the darkness”: Shostakovich’s ferocious Piano Sonata No. 1 (1926) shows the young composer determined to find his own authentic voice; Weinberg, a close friend of Shostakovich’s who fled Nazi-occupied Poland for the Soviet Union, is represented by his urbane Piano Sonata No. 4 (1955); and finally Prokofiev’s Eighth Sonata (1944), aptly summarised by Avdeeva: “An allegedly safe world suddenly turns out to be dangerous but within this piece Prokofiev musically rises above the turmoil to overcome this dark time.”