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Welcome to Holy Smoke, the Spectator's religion podcast. I'm Damien Thompson.

The pianist Maria Greenberg was one of the great musical artists of the 20th century. She was the first woman and the first

Russian to record all of the Beethoven pianosan artists, and she did so magnificently. Yet today,

she's almost forgotten, and during her lifetime she was almost forgotten. Why? Basically, the problem was that she was a Soviet Jew,

and not one of those Jews on whom the Russian authorities smiled.

I wrote a column about Maria Greenberg in the Spectator's arts pages a couple of weeks ago,

but I was interested to find out more about Jewish musicians in the Soviet Union and their relationship to a spiritual tradition that was controlled, suppressed and infiltrated by the authorities.

I'm joined by the Israeli pianist Ariel Lanyi to discuss this extraordinary woman and what she represented.

Ariel, it was you who prompted me to write that column because I was telling you that I heard

Greenberg's Beethoven piano sonatas and was bowled over by them and mystified by their obscurity.

And you said, well, there's a story there.

So I wonder if you could tell us how and why her legacy was suppressed.

I think that a big part of the reason that we don't know so much about her and that so many of

these recordings are not widely

listened to is that a lot of material of hers was basically pushed under the rug in typical

Soviet fashion.

So whenever they blacklisted somebody, they also tried to destroy whatever this person

would have left behind, as they did to quite a few composers and other artists.

And they just didn't want people to hear her work.

...