Classic Choice: the Master Recordings

RICHTER'S DVORAK

In 1960 Sviatoslav Richter (1915-97) took the West by storm, playing first in Finland, then the United States. Other post-war Soviets had preceded him - Malinin, Gilels, Bashkirov, Ashkenazy, Zhukov, Lazar Berman. But none with quite the same impact. The following pre-Prom summer he came to London, giving three recitals at the Royal Festival Hall and two concerto evenings at the Royal Albert. Desmond Shawe-Taylor of the Sunday Times found him an "enigma": "the impact of Sviatoslav Richter on London, so far, has been great, but less than was expected: less, shall we say, than that of Major Gagarin. There have been dissenting voices ... No one could be less like the conventional idea of a keyboard virtuoso. Richter creates a solitude around him as he plays. Intense concentration seems to leave him unaware of the presence of an audience. So rapt is he in this intimate communion with himself and his chosen composer that at times he seems almost to be practising... In his style there is little panache, nothing sumptuous, hardly a trace of the self-intoxicated flourish that commonly accompanies a bravura technique. This reserve is not invariably a merit, for there are kinds of music, not always meretricious, in which a frank delight in brilliance, a lavish scattering of jewels, an open sharing of pleasure between executant and listener are all part of the game..."

If the recitals were private, philosophical affairs, apparently wanting in "pianistic blood and thunder and the rampaging of a Klaviertiger," the concerto appearances were something else. Always the adventurer, never content with the merely routine, ever disdainful of the box office, Sviatoslav wooed his public with Liszt. But he wowed them with Dvorak.

Richter's London account was only the fifth occasion he'd played the G minor work before an audience. His definitive studio recording of the uncut 1876-78 Urtext appeared nearly two decades later, launched by HMV in both stereo and their then flagship SQ quadraphonic format. Newly re-mastered, the performance remains as authoritatively grand, spacious and spellbinding as ever, with Carlos Kleiber in stratospherically charismatic attendance. Richter's commitment is a lesson in dedication and persuasion, his gradation of touch a miracle of refinement, his phrasing and timing a model of the art, his slow movement a litany of faded dreams and Bohemian mists. "One of the most outstanding [releases] of the year if not the decade," I originally suggested (Records & Recording, October 1977). I was wrong. Of the century, I should have said.

The CD incarnation couples another Richter classic - his Paris Wanderer Fantasy. To some this is a dry, brisk reading; to others an incomparably cogent justification (belying its fragmented session history) of one of the most far-reaching solo piano visions of the 19th century, recorded with an immediacy that has you virtually inside the instrument if not beneath the pedals. The Wanderer was the first Schubert work Richter learnt, as a student of Neuhaus at the Moscow Conservatoire (1937-44). "It was only very late in life that I succeeded in acquiring great freedom [with it]. One must not play it academically; one has to take risks, as with scarcely any other work" ("Sviatoslav Richter in Conversation [with Jürgen Meyer-Josten, Head of Music, Bavarian Radio, Munich]" © CF Peters Frankfurt 1982, translated John Nowell, Recorded Sound No 84 © British Library July 1983).

© Ates Orga 1999