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Schumann - Fantasie, Faschingsschwank aus Wien, Papillons - Sviatoslav Richter

Posted in EMI, Piano, Schumann, Sviatoslav Richter

Richter [Rikhter], Sviatoslav (Teofilovich)

(b Zhytomyr, Ukraine, 20 March 1915; d Moscow, 1 Aug 1997). Russian pianist. His father was a German pianist and composer who studied in Vienna and taught at the Odessa Conservatory. His mother, from a landowning family of mixed national background, had been a pupil of his father. Richter grew up speaking both Russian and German. His first love was painting, which he learnt from his aunt, with whom he spent three years between the ages of four and seven, cut off from his parents by the Civil War.

On his return to Odessa in 1922, Richter began to learn the piano and to compose, being largely self-taught in both areas. As a child he also wrote plays. His earliest musical passion was for opera. He enjoyed sight-reading from vocal scores at home, and for a while he had ambitions to become a conductor. From 1930 to 1932 he worked as accompanist at the House of Sailors in Odessa in order to supplement the family income, and then at the Odessa Philharmonic. He made his solo début playing Chopin at the age of 19, and in the following year became an accompanist at the Odessa Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre.

In 1937 Richter entered the Moscow Conservatory to study with Heinrich Neuhaus, living in his teacher's house during his third year. He refused to study other subjects or to take examinations and was expelled on three occasions but reinstated at Neuhaus's insistence. He made his official début on 26 November 1940, in the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, playing works by Russian composers, including the first performance of Prokofiev's Sixth Sonata. His association with Prokofiev continued with performances of the Fifth Piano Concerto and the Seventh Sonata, the latter being another première; in gratitude Prokofiev dedicated his Ninth Sonata to Richter. In 1952, at a time when Richter had broken a finger, he made his only appearance as a conductor, with the Moscow Youth Orchestra in the first performance of the revised version of Prokofiev's Cello Concerto (the work later to be known as the Sinfonia Concertante).

World War II separated the family again, and while Richter was studying in Moscow his father was arrested, along with others of German stock in Odessa, and executed. His mother left the city together with the occupying troops at the end of the war, eventually settling near Stuttgart. Richter was reunited with her in August 1961, having believed her dead since 1942. After the war Richter's fame spread rapidly in Russia and the Eastern bloc countries, but for many years he was not allowed to travel to the West. The reasons remain a matter for speculation, but it cannot have helped that he always placed art above politics, maintaining his friendship with Pasternak at all costs, for instance; nor can it have helped that he was homosexual, despite his marriage in 1946 to Nina Dorliak. His New York and London début performances in 1960 caused a sensation and were followed by a series of recordings which have had classic status ever since (including Schumann's Fantasie, Skryabin's Fifth Sonata, Liszt's concertos and Prokofiev's Eighth Sonata). His repertory was extensive, covering Bach to Prokofiev and including many less frequently heard works, but shunning complete cycles with the exception of Bach's Das wohltemperirte Clavier.

From 1960 to 1989 Richter made an average of 70 concert appearances per year. He toured extensively in Europe and Japan, preferring to play in small venues on the way and travelling by train and car rather than by air. He avoided long-term recording contracts, but many of his live appearances were recorded and his discography is probably the largest of any pianist.

In 1964 he founded a festival at Tours, housed in a converted barn. Here and elsewhere he developed associations with favoured chamber music partners, including his wife (the singer Nina Dorliak), the violinist Oleg Kagan, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and Benjamin Britten. His association with Britten led him to produce the latter's opera The Turn of the Screw for the Moscow December Nights Festival in 1984.

In Richter's later years health and nervous problems led to many cancellations of concerts. Increasingly he preferred to play from the printed score in a hall lit by a single standard lamp, using Yamaha instruments whose neutral colourings did not impose ready-made beautiful sound on the music. Although he professed to love Wagner, Chopin and Debussy above all other composers, Richter's most memorable performances were in Beethoven, Schumann, Liszt and Prokofiev. The hallmarks of his finest playing are intense concentration over long timespans, often with unusually spacious tempos (notably in Schubert). At times this resulted in no more than plainness; but at his best his playing achieved an unequalled sense of inevitability and timelessness.

By his own admission he never took an interest in political questions and until the late 1980s he chose to make his Moscow apartment his home base. Unusually for Russians of his generation, he never taught. Painting remained an important means of expression, and in 1978 he gave an exhibition at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. A Society of Friends of Sviatoslav Richter was formed in 1987, with a dual base in England and Germany, and has dedicated itself to assembling comprehensive details of the artist's life and works.

Extracted from
The New Grove

Schumann

Fantasie in C Op. 17
Faschingsschwank aus Wien Op. 26
Papillon Op. 2

Sviatoslav Richter, piano

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Bach - Goldberg Variations, Italian Concert, Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue - Wanda Landowska

Posted in Bach, Clavicembalo, EMI, Wanda Landowska

In the first edition of Grove's Dictionary, Hubert Parry declared that the Goldberg Variations were "never played in public in consequence of the difficulty of giving due effect on one row of keys to the rapid crossing passages wich are written for two" - for Bach had specified the work as for "Clavicimbal mit 2 Manualen", and another half-century was to pass before the revival of the harpsichord from obsolescence. To a great extent this revival was due to Wanda Landowska, who after studying in her native Warsaw and in Berlin had moved to Paris ad immersed herself whole-heartedly in research into the interpretation of 17th and 18th-century keyboard music. Though she had already played Bach on the piano, in 1903 she opted decisively for the harpsichord, energetically championing it in European concert tours, articles and a book: later she had an instrument built to her own specification by Pleyel and started teaching at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. After the war she transferred to Paris, where she lectured at the Sorbonne and gave classes at the Ecole Normale, then visited the USA for the first time and made her first gramophone records. In 1925 she settled at St. Leu-la-Forêt, north of Paris, where she established her own school; and it was in its concert hall that, after years of study of the work and exploration of its background, she first performed the Goldberg Variations in May 1933. The recording of it she made in Paris a few months later - here reissued in a moderns format - created a sensation: it was the first time that this masterpiece of Bach's, universally recognised as among the greatest of all variation sets, had ever beeb recorded - although even then it was issued in a limited "Society" edition because few other than musical scholars knew the work. ...

Lionel Salter, 1987

Bach

Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 (1933)
Italian Concerto, BWV 971 (1935-36)
Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, BWV 903 (1935)

Wanda Landowska, harpsichord

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