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Sviatoslav Richter LIVE – Playing Beethoven (Moscow, 1976)
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Piano Sonata No. 1 in F minor, Op. 2, No. 1 00:07 I Allegro 05:50 II Adagio 10:15 III Menuetto – Allegretto 13:57 IV Prestissimo
Piano Sonata No. 7 in D major, Op. 10, No. 3 21:30 I Presto 28:28 II Largo e mesto 37:01 III Menuetto: Allegro 40:04 IV Rondo: Allegro
Piano Sonata No. 9 in E major, Op. 14, No. 1 45:14 I Allegro 52:17 II Allegretto 58:13 III Rondo – Allegro comodo
Piano Sonata No. 12 in A-flat major, Op. 26 “Funeral March” 01:01:46 I Andante con variazioni 01:08:29 II Scherzo: Allegro molto 01:11:32 III
Marcia funebre sulla morte di un eroe: Maestoso andante 01:17:35 IV Allegro 01:21:35 Bagatelle in G major, op.126 no.1 (Andante con moto, Cantabile e compiacevole)
Recorded live at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, 15 October 1976
Sviatoslav Richter
He performed for more than 60 years, and his technique is second to none, in addition to greatly respecting each author he played.
He was born near Zhytomyr (Ukraine) on March 20, 1915.
His father was an organist and who introduced him to music.
As a young man, he was self-taught and developed his exceptional technique by playing various pieces. He had the ability to memorize any play by seeing it once.
Sviatoslav Richter grew up in Odessa, where his father was a professor at the Conservatory.
He debuted as a soloist on February 19, 1934, at the Engineering Center of that city.
The program included only works by Chopin: the Ballad No. 4, the Scherzo in E Major, and a selection of nocturnes, studies and preludes, all works of great difficulty. The recital was a success and his career as a keyboard virtuoso had begun.
In 1937 Richter went to Moscow to study with the great pianist and pedagogue Heinrich Neuhaus.
He heard him play and said: “Here is the student I have been waiting for all my life. In my opinion, he is a genius.’ Years later, Neuhaus would write: ‘I have not met anyone who knew how to take advantage of his qualities so much.’
On November 26, 1940, while still a student at the Moscow Conservatory, Richter made his Moscow debut. It was then that he presented Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 6 in public for the first time, making a great impression on the audience and the composer himself.
When Prokofiev completed his seventh sonata in 1942, he gave it to Richter for the premiere. He studied it in just four days and presented it the following January. Later, he did the same with the eighth and ninth sonatas, the last of which had been dedicated to him by the author.
Richter’s first victory in competition came in 1945, at the Union Performers Meet. The jury was headed by Dmitri Shostakovich, and Emil Gilels also participated. Richter got the first prize. Shostakovich later wrote: “Richter is an extraordinary phenomenon. The greatness of his talent seizes and staggers. All musical art is accessible to him.”
Richter won the Stalin Prize in 1949 and received all kinds of distinctions and awards from the Soviet government.
In 1945, he accompanied the Russian soprano Nina Dorliak in a program that included songs by Rimsky-Korsakov and Prokofiev. This was the beginning of a partnership that would last as long as their lives. Richter and Dorliak were never officially married, but they were inseparable companions. With her practicality, she brought balance to Richter’s impulsive nature. She helped him organize his schedule, reminded him of his appointments, and handled his professional commitments.
When he was serving as a judge at the First Tchaikovsky Contest held in Moscow in 1958, Richter was so impressed by Van Cliburn’s performance that he assigned 100 more points (when the maximum was 10) and 0 to the rest. Cliburn won, but Richter was no longer invited to jury duty.
Western music fans got their first chance to hear Richter through his recordings from the 1950s, and his reputation among specialists grew rapidly.
When Gilels toured the US in 1955, his response to critics praising his performances was: ‘Wait till you hear Richter!’ Entrepreneur Sol Hurok tried to arrange a tour, but the Soviet government authorized it only a few years later.
During the 1950s, Richter toured the communist countries of Eastern Europe. In May 1960 he was allowed to travel to the West, but only as far as Helsinki. Five months later he made his debut in Chicago. He played the Second Brahms Concerto, with Erich Leinsdorf conducting.
A recording of this work, which was made the following day, still remains in the catalogue. His New York debut was a series of seven recitals in ten days at Carnegie Hall (October 1960). The Juilliard School’s senior piano teacher, Rosina Lhevinne, praised him, saying, ‘Richter is an inspired poet of music, an exceptional phenomenon of the 20th century.’
Sviatoslav Richter was much in demand for performances and recordings.
He toured the world and performed with the biggest orchestras, but he soon decided that he didn’t want that kind of life. It was against his nature to make commitments years in advance. He preferred to follow his impulses and explore new repertoires.
In 1964 Sviatoslav Richter, the van de Velde family and EMI record producer Jacques Leiser created an annual festival: the Musical Festivals in Touraine (Grange de Meslay, near Tours). Richter was to spend each summer in the French countryside and give a few recitals with fellow musicians, including Benjamin Britten, David Oistrakh, and Pierre Fournier. Richter loved France and spent thirty summers there.
In addition to his career as a pianist, Richter devoted himself to painting. He produced some splendid watercolors. He also made a directorial appearance in 1952, as a result of a minor injury to his finger.
Richter feared that he would never be able to play the piano again, and studied conducting for a few weeks. But his finger quickly recovered and, after a performance of Prokofiev’s Symphony-Concerto with Mstislav Rostropovich, he returned to the keyboard.
He loved the operas of Wagner, Tchaikovsky, and Verdi.
He didn’t like the phone because he doesn’t allow to see the person with whom he is talking. Furthermore, he also did not like airplanes, and he preferred to travel by car or by train.
But he loved to travel: in 1986 he drove from Moscow to Vladivostok in the Pacific, giving concerts in a few small towns along the way.
Sviatoslav Richter thoroughly enjoyed bringing his art to the small towns of Siberia at an age when many colleagues stop performing.
He also always gave recitals, in which he risked all his prestige by allowing recordings to be made for later mass distribution. During his last years he gained a reputation as an artist capable of canceling commitments on the hour, without notice and on a whim.
Richter followed his muse and lived a precarious life: according to Francis van de Velde, ‘when he needed money, he gave a concert.’
Richter’s last concert was in Lübeck (Germany), at the end of March 1995. He was eighty years old. On the program were three Haydn sonatas and Max Reger’s Variations on Beethoven Themes.
Richter died in Moscow on August 1, 1997, at the age of 82, the victim of a heart attack.
ABOUT SVIATOSLAV RICHTER (1915-1997)
– The Italian critic Piero Rattalino has asserted that the only pianists comparable to Richter in the history of piano performance were Franz Liszt and Ferruccio Busoni.
– Glenn Gould called Richter one of “the most powerful musical communicators of our time”.
– Van Cliburn attended a Richter recital in 1958 in the Soviet Union. He reportedly cried during the recital and, upon returning to the United States, described Richter’s playing as “the most powerful piano playing I have ever heard”.
– Arthur Rubinstein described his first exposure to Richter as follows: “It really wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. Then at some point I noticed my eyes growing moist: tears began rolling down my cheeks.”
– Heinrich Neuhaus described Richter as follows: “His singular ability to grasp the whole and at the same time miss none of the smallest details of a composition suggests a comparison with an eagle who from his great height can see as far as the horizon and yet single out the tiniest detail of the landscape.”
– Dmitri Shostakovich wrote of Richter: “Richter is an extraordinary phenomenon. The enormity of his talent staggers and enraptures. All the phenomena of musical art are accessible to him.”
– Vladimir Horowitz said: “Of the Russian pianists, I like only one, Richter”
– Pierre Boulez wrote of Richter: “His personality was greater than the possibilities offered to him by the piano, broader than the very concept of complete mastery of the instrument.”
– Gramophone critic Bryce Morrison described Richter as follows: “Idiosyncratic, plain-speaking, heroic, reserved, lyrical, virtuosic and perhaps above all, profoundly enigmatic, Sviatoslav Richter remains one of the greatest recreative artists of all time.”
Yuri Borísov about Sviatoslav Richter: “Dialogues with Sviatoslav Richter”.
An exceptional book about a unique artist: Yuri Borísov (Kiev, 1956 – Moscow, 2007) took notes over years of friendship with the pianist Sviatoslav Richter (Khtomir, Ukraine, 1915 – Moscow, 1997) and from there emerged this book. Richter was a unique case where art, true culture and talent break any repressive brake or spurious power.
He lived in a Soviet Union during the hard years, and he survived many reprisals of his generation, he played with sheet music, he traveled with his piano and his tuner, he wanted to be a painter.
His huge repertoire is at the end of this edition, eruditely expanded and allows us to assess the august reason for his always maxim: “It is important to play works that are rarely performed”. Borisov never aspired to biographical writing; he knew that he had in his hands an irreplaceable material that he had to weave from the poetic or from the very shadows of Richter’s elusive personality.
It is thus that the chronological folds to the thematic almost until the end, in a search for that immense artist’s monologue to cover its entire body and leave the reader with two basic impressions: the desolate soul of the music and the prismatic personality of a performer who far surpassed his legend. Richter dictates to Borisov:
“Biography is the lowest there is. Pure gossip. And the reality that surrounds her is even more vile. Do you know the biography of Brahms well? For a long time he persecuted Clara [Schumann], but what else does he know? And the biography of [Cesar] Franck? They disappear into his music, they need to close themselves off from life. Can you imagine Schubert with a phone? (…) There has to be more mystery. Do we know if Shakespeare existed? That doesn’t bother me.’
There are few photos of Richter laughing. That bitter rictus that does not imply disdain but an abyssal loneliness and the spiritual labyrinth itself, the one that was unleashed in his way of playing and now we find it again between the lines in this book.
Between the photograph on the cover of the volume of Cliff and the latest images of the dancer Vaslav Nijinski there is a disturbing and disturbing resemblance, even knowing that this could be merely subjective to the observer, the truth is that Ricther was also pursued by his ghosts until the end, that in the Soviet Union, where he had to experience the clinical treatment of his depressions, which were becoming more and more, was already a stigma in itself, another to add to that of gay, Ukrainian and half-German.
In Borisov’s book, the role of his faithful companion, the singer Nina Dorliak (1908-1998), a lifelong ally, with whom he shared time, confidences and art, is very clear. Everything that this book recounts is so Russian!, a somewhat Chekhovian stylistic and where Gógol also plays his role not only as inspiring some phrases, something that the translator has scrupulously respected in his translation into Spanish and as far as the idiomatic distance. There is a kind of recurring medullary sadness, of a rhythmic song or soliloquy where the artist unravels himself, surrenders to the unveiling of his instinct under a light that makes the atmosphere yellow and that seems to come from thin votive candles.
Beyond the middle of the book, chapter XVII (I swallowed a bell) is shocking. As graphic and somber as a sequence from Tarkovsky, the walk that culminates in the visit to the Novodevichy cemetery puts things in their proper place. There he has time to remember, between the tomb of his teacher Neuhaus and that of Scriabin, how Fischer-Dieskau sang The Gravedigger’s Nostalgia (Totengräbers Heimweh, Schubert) accompanied by him on the keyboard.
Then Richter hums ‘My time will come, and who will bury me?’ Along Richter’s path there is a list of his tastes and preferences: churches with stained glass windows, cemeteries, museums, almost all Russian painting, Proust, masquerades… and he was always proud of his initial self-education.
There is also a humor permeated by unconfessed nostalgia, broken passions, concealment and a certain sarcasm (“The best thing about Diaghilev’s tomb is that it is on an island” or “On one occasion I told Nina Dorliak: ‘Let’s have a child! ‘ And I really wanted to. ‘But, Nina, try to make a nine-year-old boy born! It’s such an ordeal that they take so long to grow up and come to their senses!’
If a modest rigor of aesthetic roots made him abandon composition right away (“There is no point in bringing more bad music into this world”), he did cultivate great friendships, such as that of Benjamin Britten and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears (whom he came to to accompany) or that of Marlene Dietrich.
His status as a more or less recognized homosexual and his fame as a rebel that he accumulated since his time as a student at the Moscow Conservatory, are issues that Borisov does not touch on, but essential in what Sviatoslav Teofilovich Richter hated so much: biography.
This is one of those books that will always be at hand, it makes you want to go buy many records, accumulate that monumental record library that Richter quotes, hums, limits or recommends. From each of these pieces, major or minor, the pianist leaves at least one suggestive phrase, a powerful exergue that, if not summarized, opens a fruitful path of interpretation.
And what is certain is that this book will make us more lovers of the piano and music, and that we will resort to it in the hard and the mature.
Richter played for the last time in Madrid on February 16 and 17, 1995, first in a special concert-gift at the Prado Museum organized by the Reina Sofía School of Music and where he performed pieces by Haydn, Prokofiev and Ravel, and the next day at the National Auditorium; when in the summer of 2010 Elisabeth Leonskaja (whom she considered her aesthetic heir) played Schumann’s Symphonic Studies Opus 13 at the Victoria Eugenia Theater in San Sebastián, something by Richter floated in the room, because he also played them and he loved them. speaks to Borisov in the book
It is not a myth that Richter died in his house in Moscow learning and studying music. Borísov spreads a cloak over recent years, the nebula of man besieged by depressions.