CBSO Centre, Birmingham
Joe Cutler’s new work – premiered here by BCMG – is an awkward mix of fact and fantasy that adds up to less than the sum of its parts
The pianist and teacher Maria Yudina was one of the most enigmatic musicians of the Soviet era. A friend of Shostakovich (her student contemporary), Boris Pasternak and Osip Mandelstam, she was an openly devout Christian and a champion of many western modernist composers who were proscribed in the Soviet Union. Although banned from giving recitals for a number of years, she seems to have led something of charmed life during Stalin’s reign of terror, inspiring a number of stories – almost certainly apocryphal – about the tyrant’s admiration for her playing.
Those stories are one of the starting points for Joe Cutler’s chamber opera Sonata for Broken Fingers, which received its premiere in a concert performance with Sian Edwards conducting Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. It is described rather hopefully as a “dark absurdist thriller”, but what Cutler and his librettist Max Hoehn have produced is an awkward mix of fact and fantasy. In their text, Yudina becomes the pianist and pedagogue Maria Maximova, who has been incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital as what Soviet doctors term a “sluggish schizophrenic”, and whose recordings have all been destroyed. Late one night in 1953, Stalin demands that a recording of Maximova playing “Beethoven’s Sonata No 33” (why not a real Beethoven sonata?) is sent to his office by the following morning. No one has the courage to tell him that all of her recordings have been destroyed on his orders, and so the pianist, who has not played for five years and has two broken fingers, is rushed into a recording studio and forced to rerecord the sonata.
