The Seventh Continent /

In the somewhat unlikely setting of the Theatre de Champs Elysees in Paris recently, I caught a piece of Russia. It was in the hands, I saw, as the Russian-born French pianist Mikhail Rudy played Liszt’s “Sonata in B Minor,” part of a dazzling recital. In so many passages, watching his hands was like watching those of my husband, Sergei Dreznin, also a pianist (and a composer), when he plays the same piece. Pianists never produce identical sounds or interpretations. But here, in many, many instances, their hands moved in identical ways in certain passages to produce a velvety, singing tone and shape a phrase with the rounded eloquence of great oratory.

And I knew:
this is the Russian school the one that these men inherited straight from pre-revolutionary times.

Mikhail’s professor Yakov Flier and Sergei’s beloved teacher Boris Berlin both studied under the legendary Russian pianist Konstantin Igumnov. Flier and Berlin went different ways in their careers in Moscow, as Mikhail and Sergei have in theirs. But the inflection, the touch, is something that was preserved, preciously, and passed on – both despite and because of the generally brutal Communist system that dictated the course of Russia’s turbulent 20th century.

The night before we attended the concert, Sergei and I sat up late in our kitchen – very Russian, this – and read large excerpts from Mikhail’s memoirs, just published in French. Raised in the Ukrainian city of Donetsk, he had risen to be a star student of the Moscow Conservatory, and later – despite harassment from the KGB, and political difficulty – gained the rare privilege of participating in international competition, winning the prestigious Marguerite Long in Paris in 1975 and then defecting in France during a victory concert tour in 1976.

The very system that gave him the best possible musical education for free had also done everything to deprive him of the fruits of that self-same education. In France, thanks to his talent and hard work, but also to initial support from such luminaries as the then-exiled Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, Mikhail embarked on what continues to be a rich and rewarding career.

That was not, however, what most caught our attention. Rather it was the descriptions of growing up in the Soviet Union.

On Russia / Essays / Alison Smale