In 2010, when Yulianna Avdeeva gave her first London recital after winning the Warsaw Chopin piano competition critics heard too much steely dominance in her playing. One can only assume that something good must have happened to Avdeeva in the intervening years, because in this Wigmore debut recital her playing was generous and warm, though the concentration was absolutely formidable.
She began with Bach’s second English suite, well controlled but without rigidity, the tone rich in the Russian manner, the forward propulsion infectious. In the ornate Sarabande Avdeeva showed she can contain the natural verve of her playing when she needs to, and the conversation between the hands had natural grace. The closing Gigue was grandly done, exhilarating and articulate.
An interesting group of Chopin pieces followed, a set of the Op 7 Mazurkas bookended by larger statements in the shape of the F major Ballade and the inevitable A flat Polonaise. The Ballade was imperiously controlled, the Polonaise more driven than usual and less rhetorical. Avdeeva was at her most individual in the Mazurkas, teasing out the humour in the B flat opening piece and probing the harmonic uncertainties of the A minor that follows.
Her fine performance of Prokofiev’s eighth sonata confirmed her artistic status. The long lyrical but unsettled first movement, punctuated by surging scales, brought to mind Sviatoslav Richter’s comment that the eighth is like a tree richly laden with fruit. Avdeeva captured the sonata’s many contrasts of light and shade but the way she never lost her grip of the work’s shape and seriousness was particularly impressive.
