Book of the week

Using the stories of pianos which went with their owners into exile, or were played in bleak prison-camps, Roberts tells of a society and people in a time of great upheaval.

The Lost Pianos of Siberia by Sophy Roberts (Doubleday, $38)

Russia, it is said, stops at the northsouth divide of the Ural Mountains, and the great reach of Siberia begins. It is a land of taiga forest, huge lakes, Arctic tundra, and has immense natural resources – but for many years it was a place of exile and imprisonment for the designated enemies of the Russian and Soviet states.

Sophy Roberts’ book, The Lost Pianos of Siberia, examines this history through a very particular

perspective. Using the stories of pianos which belonged to original settler families, went with their owners into forced internal exile, were played in bleak prison-camps, or found homes in the concert halls of remote cities, Roberts tells of a society and people in a time of great political upheaval.

Edmond De Waal’s best-selling The Hare with the Amber Eyes used a small netsuke – a miniature carved object – one of the few surviving possessions of his formerly wealthy Jewish family, to relate their story.

Roberts’ search for the significant and forgotten pianos of Siberia does a very similar thing –

except her investigation has a greater scope.

There is the piano of the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg where the tsar, the tsarina, and their children were confined by the Bolsheviks for months until their midnight massacre in 1918. While the house itself would eventually be demolished to prevent it becoming a place of pilgrimage, Roberts attempts to locate the upright piano the royal family played in their confinement.

Then at the beginning of World War II – or the Great Patriotic War, as the Russians refer to it – many of the officials, the artworks, and the Soviet orchestras

were evacuated from Leningrad or Moscow to perceived safety beyond the Urals. This great retreat included players and their musical instruments who travelled on seemingly endless train journeys, spending days in forested sidings to avoid bombing, before finding temporary refuge in small Siberian cities.

Roberts tries to discover ‘‘the true history of the Novosibirsk Steinway which the Leningrad Philharmonia-in-exile might have played’’.

She also finds pianos in cities associated with the Gulag Archipelago of prison camps and other more recent instruments played by famous musicians, such as Sviatoslav Richter.

Along with the histories of the pianos themselves, Roberts unearths a dedicated network of piano-tuners, keeping the old knowledge alive, and whose lives are no less interesting than the storied instruments they repair.

The Lost Pianos of Siberia isa detective story as well as a cultural history and a book of travel.

More than anything, though, it is an engaging study of the importance of music to people during a time of turmoil in one of the world’s most remote places.

– David Herkt