Why did the Soviets not want us to know about the pianist Maria Grinberg?

Only four women pianists have recorded complete cycles of the Beethoven piano sonatas: Maria Grinberg, Annie Fischer, H. J. Lim and Mari Kodama. I’ve written before about the chain-smoking ‘Ashtray Annie’ Fischer: she was a true poet of the piano and her Beethoven sonatas are remarkably penetrating — as, alas, is the sound of her beaten-up Bösendorfer. Lim produced her cycle in a hurry when she was just 24; it’s engaging but breathless. Kodama’s set, just completed, is a bit polite.

Which leaves Maria Grinberg (1908–78), whose recordings remain just where the Soviet authorities wanted them. In obscurity. That is shameful — and not because she was the first woman and the first Russian to record all the sonatas. (In those days Jews from Odessa in Ukraine counted as Russians.) This is an unforgettable cycle. Unforgettable, that is, in the unlikely event that you’ve heard it.

Grinberg’s insights linger in the mind even if you don’t particularly like what she’s doing. In the finale of the Moonlight, for example, the chords at the top of the arpeggios would drown out a tractor factory. But elsewhere in the movement the treble melts away to reveal the ingenuity below the stave.

That’s a Grinberg hallmark. She balances voices to shift the listener’s perspective. I kept hearing dotted rhythms and crossed hands that I’d failed to pick up in other performances. The lower octaves ring out with unusual clarity. Perhaps that’s something to do with the fact that, as a young woman, Grinberg lost her state-funded job as a pianist and worked as an orchestral timpanist.

No one communicated better the polyphonic sweetness of late Beethoven. Listen to the mini-motet that precedes the final storm in the fugue of the Hammerklavier. Grinberg plays it with glowing serenity; for a moment we could be in the Sistine Chapel.