DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON 463649
Total Time:  78’:49”
midprice

Current Reviews

by Jon Yungkans

Sergei Prokofiev
Piano Concerto No. 1-3

Martha Argerich, piano
Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor



Samuel Barber
Orchestral Works and Concertos
Leonard Slatkin, Charles Munch



Rimsky-Korsakov
Evgeny Svetlanov


Beethoven
Symphony No.9
Piano Transcription by Franz Liszt
Konstantin Scherbakov, Piano



Kronos Caravan

I’ve not yet found the key to Mozart.

Sviatoslav Richter, Richter the Enigma

Even without the keys, Sviatoslav Richter had a keen sense of what lay behind the door. 

Speed is the first thing you notice   – very moderate.  Not forcibly fast or doggedly slow.  Slow enough to allow notes and phrases to gain weight and build block-by-block, foot-by-foot, wall-by-wall. 

With that weight comes power, force, drama.  The crush of inevitability is like Atlas feeling the weight of the world on his shoulders, pressing down on him forever; his torso morphed pain into stone; his arms frozen into a cradle of crucifixion, the crib of every mortal on the planet.

“I have such a memory that it’s unbearable.  In the many cities I’ve traveled to, I’ve met 40 or 50 people.  Their names are all lined up in my head and I remember them.  It’s torture!  And then, all my acquaintances.  And acquaintances of acquaintances!  ...  It’s been like that all my life, whether in Russia or in the West.”

Richter the Enigma

 Then you notice what you don’t hear in this performance.  There is no repose; everything is tense, uneasy.  Even in the central Romance there is a definite lack of calm – nothing proves the movement’s title.  Repose is essential to Mozart; without it his music lacks flow and balance.  But here the unease adds an extra dimension.  With Richter, the Romance becomes a pause between two highly pitched halves of a battle, or the still-electrically-charged calm between two parts of a storm, with no break from the ongoing rage. 

To tell the truth, I prefer Haydn….  I fight Mozart’s music.  Is it a difficulty of my brain? …

Richter the Enigma

The key that Richter lacked, and perhaps why he fought against it – not only in Mozart but in his whole life – was serenity.  Richter was at the core a deeply depressed and frustrated man – artistically, personally and sexually.  He had a lighthearted, even wildly comical side.  But he felt that the world would not let him simply be himself.  To him it was a wearisome and elusive secret.  He could not be happy.  And because he could not be happy he waged a war of Beethovenian proportions within his soul.

What is the secret about Mozart?  Does anyone play him well?  A phrase which would seem easy in Haydn or Beethoven would seem horribly difficult in Mozart ….

 Richter the Enigma

By the end, his psyche had been flattened into total surrender.  The wild purity that was the essence of Richter could no longer bear the weight on its shoulders.  Even if it is taken wildly out of context, Richter’s final comment in the film is extraordinarily telling: 

I do not like myself.

Richter the Enigma

What is truly remarkable in Richter’s K 466 – and what makes it really work, sometimes despite itself – is wholeness, a total balance of warring elements.  The duality to Richter’s approach between light and dark, good and evil, is a struggle more pointed and brutally malevolent than we normally hear.  But both parts of that duality are equally matched. How much of that conflict is Mozart’s and how much is Richter’s is debatable.  But those conflicts have merged into one titanic struggle.  You could argue that Richter is over-imposing himself onto the score.  But could it also be that that under the surface, he is not painting over Mozart’s landscape but simply illuminating it, lovingly restoring it to show us a scene that has been this bleak and hostile all along? 

Richter believed everything in a performance must be symmetrical.  Explaining this, the pianist quoted his friend, painter Robert Falk.  Falk told Richter that the most difficult thing to draw is a perfect circle, and that the easiest way to make that circle is to use two hands to trace it.  Richter draws a perfect circle here, embracing evenly and continually the radiance and roiling shadows of K 466, sometimes in unexpected places. 

This element of surprise, Richter believed, was essential in music.  He said that when everything in a piece was planned in advance, that performance would always collapse, so he liked to leave himself open to chance.  The music here shifts constantly in tone, phrasing and emphasis, with new colors and patterns falling into place as though we are looking through a revolving kaleidoscope, never returning twice in quite the same way.  Even in Beethoven’s cadenzas, Richter uses a wide variety of tone and touch, making the music breathe, sing and intone as never before, not only matching the rest of the piece but giving them an organic and substantive quality that has never crossed my ears before.  For once, these cadenzas work, not only in the context of the concerto but also as independent pieces in their musical worth. 

The Beethoven Third Concerto is even finer.  Those qualities of balance and indeterminacy are still present and fully active, but here Richter is back on home territory, and it shows.  The anxiety underlining the Mozart is replaced with an almost swaggering confidence – partly Beethoven’s, partly Richter’s ability for letting the torridness of his soul finally boil – combined with tremendous energy, despite what are again very moderate tempos.

Tempering and adding density to this approach is tremendous subtlety – very much the velvet glove covering the iron fist – as well as immense emotional range, depth and eloquence.  Richter’s performance is the Beethoven of the late sonatas, looking back on earlier work and adding the introspection, wisdom and constant emotional fluctuations from those works to the drive and drama of this one.  All this adds to one of the most complex, chimeral and tremendously satisfying playings this work has received.

The sound DG gave Richter is a marvel in itself and shows how much of a disservice RCA did to him in their up-close-and-personal approach to miking that was standard at the time they recorded him.  As much as RCA captured Richter’s overall approach, they did little to really harness the Richter sound.  Here, that rich golden tone and constant shifting of color, intensity and shading are rendered in something approaching its full glory.

Richter’s partnering in both these works is equally rewarding.  Both Stanislaw Wislocki and Kurt Sanderling (above, left) had enjoyed long and positive musical relationships with Richter and understood his approach in Mozart and Beethoven thoroughly.  There is none of the battling for control that plagued Richter’s recordings with Herbert von Karajan.  Instead, both Wislocki and Sanderling dovetail and add to Richter’s conception of these works.

The Beethoven Rondo in B flat major is a lightweight but highly pleasing encore – Mozartean in its playfulness, elegance and emotional half-shading, while showing glimpses of the Beethoven to come later in the central episode.  Richter and Sanderling perform it with all the joie de vivre and champagne frothiness this work deserves, ending the proceedings on a high note.

This disc is, in two words, essential listening.

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