NYT: Sviatoslav Richter, Enigmatic Pianist, Playing With Contradictions

[Frank Forman]

I find him much too fussy, having listened to hundreds of his recordings.
The only really good one is of Pictures at an Exhibition. I don't see what
all the fuss about Richter is.

Sviatoslav Richter, Enigmatic Pianist, Playing With Contradictions
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/27/arts/music/sviatoslav-richter-enigmatic-pianist-playing-with-contradictions.html

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

After Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviet Union lifted a bit of the
Iron Curtain to allow some major midcareer Russian artists to make
debuts in America. Among them were the violinist David Oistrakh and
the pianist Emil Gilels, both in 1955. Notably missing was the
towering pianist Sviatoslav Richter, an artist of, in the best
sense, demonic powers, whose performances combined stunning
technique, myriad colorings and fierce integrity. Every time Gilels
was lavished with praise by musicians in America, he would offer
thanks, then add, "Wait until you hear Richter!"

In 1960, Richter was finally sanctioned by Soviet officialdom to
make a North American tour. But if you take at face value some
comments that this intensely private, often evasive pianist made
during "Richter the Enigma," a 1998 documentary by the French
filmmaker Bruno Monsaingeon, he never wanted to undertake this tour
at all. "I was forced to go," Richter, whose centennial is this
year, says at one point. But who forced him? We never find out.

Richter, who died at 82 in 1997, disliked traveling and hated
airplanes. As the tour approached, he grew ill and depressed.
Setting out for the journey, he almost went to the wrong station and
missed his train, he recalled to Monsaingeon. "I wish I had missed
it," he added.

But with a Soviet "minder" tagging along, Richter, then 45 and in
his prime, made that tour to the United States and Canada, playing
some 30 concerts over three months late in 1960. American music
lovers who knew of him as a legend finally heard him live.

His American debut took place in Chicago on Oct. 15, when he
performed Brahms's Second Piano Concerto with the Chicago Symphony
Orchestra. The conductor Erich Leinsdorf stepped in on short notice
for Fritz Reiner, the orchestra's music director, who was ill. The
performance was a sensation. Two days later, everyone reassembled at
Orchestra Hall to record the concerto for RCA.

To celebrate the Richter anniversary, Sony Classical has released an
18-disc box set of all his live and studio recordings for RCA and
Columbia, newly remastered. The collection goes from that 1960
Brahms Second through two discs of live recordings Richter made in
1988 at the Schleswig-Holstein Festival in Germany, including
Beethoven's First Piano Concerto with Christoph Eschenbach and the
festival orchestra. During his career, Richter recorded for many
companies, including Russian labels; his discography is sizable.
Still, with the breadth of repertory contained here (Beethoven,
Chopin, Liszt, Schubert, Schumann, Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff), this
Sony set offers a rich, exciting portrait.

The Richter/Chicago Brahms Second Concerto is one of the greatest
recordings of the century. The liner notes by Claudia Cassidy, at
the time the music critic of The Chicago Tribune, describe the
performance as "the Brahms Second of a listening lifetime."

A high point of Richter's tour came in five recitals played over 12
days in October at Carnegie Hall, included here. Though at the time
I was in grade school on Long Island, I knew these concerts were
taking place and later bought some of the live recordings that were
issued, including a two-LP album of Richter's New York debut
program: five Beethoven sonatas, ending with the "Appassionata."
That high-tension "Appassionata" stunned me as a child and still
does.

In the subdued, mysterious opening of the first movement, Richter
plays with bold spaciousness. Forward motion is achieved less from a
steady tempo than from sheer suspense. He makes the most of the
extreme contrasts between hushed tension and vehement agitation. The
perpetual-motion finale, played with eerily controlled wildness,
seems at once unhinged and inevitable. He hits a few clinkers in the
breathless coda, a problem he cleaned up in a studio recording he
made the next month, also included here. I prefer the on-the-edge
live "Appassionata."

In his revealing, sometimes exasperating film, Mr. Monsaingeon milks
the mystique of Richter as an enigma, relying on archival footage,
including many performances, and interviews. In the opening
sequence, as we hear Richter playing the slow movement of Schubert's
late Sonata in B-flat, a text appears: "Richter is a world unto
himself, impenetrable yet radiant; a deepwater fish, blind but
luminous." Come now.

Though Richter sometimes speaks with disarming frankness, the film
fails to clear up his many guarded recollections of crucial events,
some of them shattering, in his life, including his German
expatriate father's arrest and execution for suspected espionage in
1941. Richter's mother, involved at the time with the man who would
become her second husband, refused to leave and flee with the family
to safety. Richter's account is extremely confusing.

Still, the film suggests that as a person, and in the conflicted way
he handled his career, Richter was a bundle of contradictions. He
decided on the piano relatively late and never considered himself a
prodigy. Instead, as a teenager, Richter found jobs playing in
factories and nursing homes and became a coach at the local opera
and ballet. Yet, when he auditioned at Moscow Conservatory for the
pianist Heinrich Neuhaus, who would become his most influential
teacher, Neuhaus, deeply impressed, whispered to a nearby student
that he thought young Richter a "musician of genius."

In his maturity, Richter claimed that he never practiced more than
three hours a day. Yet in 1943, he gave the premiere of Prokofiev's
Seventh Sonata, one of the most technically challenging pieces in
the repertory, having learned it in four intensive days. He also
learned and memorized the second book of Bach's "Well-Tempered
Clavier" in a month, an astonishing feat.

During his most active years, he had a repertory of 80 diverse
recital programs. Yet he bucked against the protocols of
concertizing, which necessitated committing to performances months,
even years, in advance. In his later decades, he preferred
performing on relatively short notice in smaller halls, which at his
insistence were kept dark except for a lamp placed near the piano to
illuminate the printed scores, which by that point in his career he
routinely used.

If Richter was an enigmatic man, his playing was anything but.
Whether charging through Prokofiev sonatas, exploring the
fantastical realms of Schumann's piano pieces, or playing Debussy
with ravishing delicacy, Richter makes every element of a
performance purposeful. In a 1996 review in The New York Times of a
10-disc set of Richter recordings for Melodiya, a Russian label, the
critic Bernard Holland wrote that authority rises around the
pianist's performances "like great stone monuments." Mr. Richter, he
asserted, "does not interpret a piece of music; he looms over it."

I know what bothers Mr. Holland: Richter is the definition of a
formidable pianist, for better or worse.

But ever since I first heard him live as a teenager, at a 1965
recital at Carnegie Hall, I've been happy to let Mr. Richter loom
over any piece he chose to play. That recital ended with Chopin's
Four Scherzos. I still remember being swept away by Scherzo No. 4 in
E, generally thought the lightest, most fanciful of the group.

Richter plays the piece on one of the 1960 Carnegie Hall concerts;
hearing the recording brought back that distant performance. A
lightweight Chopin piece? Not in this account. Richter dispatches
the recurring bursts of leaping, gentle chords with playfulness; the
spiraling passagework unfolds with shimmering sound and uncanny
clarity. Yet in the way he projects the music's sudden swings from
bouncy bits, to wistfully lyrical stretches, to episodes of dizzying
passagework, he makes this scherzo sound stealthy and dangerous.

In 2010, Richter's secretive side was explored in a well-received
biography by the Danish composer and writer Karl Aage Rasmussen, who
drew extensively on family archives and interviews with Richter
associates. One subject he explores is Richter's long-rumored
homosexuality. In the mid-1940s, Richter met Nina Dorliak, a singer
who became a frequent recital partner, as well as his lifelong
companion and confidante. It was thought that the couple married in
1946; this turns out not to be so. One can imagine what it must have
been like for Richter to disguise male sexual attractions at a time
when such behavior could be criminal in the Soviet Union.

Still, affirming scenes in "Richter the Enigma" show the couple
greeting guests for holiday gatherings and playing music with
friends for fun. Richter clearly made the accommodations he had to.

Speaking of accommodations, listeners to these reissued recording
will have to make some to the variable audio quality in several of
the live performances, especially the 1960 Carnegie Hall recitals.
But it truly doesn't matter.

The milky hues and warmth of Richter's sound in Debussy's "Images"
come through miraculously. At the other extreme is his brash,
incisive account of Prokofiev's Sonata No. 6, brutal, percussive,
yet triumphantly pianistic. The restless, scurrying finale, which
usually sounds like madcap music for a silent movie, comes across in
Richter's performance like the soundtrack to a demented cartoon. Yet
every note is audible under his control.

Richter an enigma? Not when he played the piano.