Sviatoslav Richter and the Joy of Misery (Preview to His 10 Best Recordings)

Richter, at his best, had few peers, but like that other great but troubled artist, Wilhelm Furtwängler, you never knew what you were going to get, especially as he tended to disparage studio recording. Here is a brief overview of his legacy on disc. For his 10 Best Recordings, check out the ClassicsToday.com feature video for Insider subscribers, and if you haven't yet subscribed, please consider doing so here: www.classicsto...

[@sylvio1980]

Hello David ! Always great to see a new video from you. Richter’s live recording of Hammerklavier in Prague is for me the greatest rendition of it I’ve heard so far. I think he was really good at late sonatas and just ok in earlier works.

[@caleblaw3497]

I recently purchased the 50-cd 100-th Anniversary Edition from Melodiya. I haven't started listening to it yet. The case is very beautiful and high quality, like a treasure case, with photos and other goodies

[@gavingriffiths2633]

The reverse of the gloomy/Richter coin is jolly/Rubinstein - a pianist who expresses joy whether he is playing Chopin, Brahms or Debussy. So rare....perhaps an Artur Rubinstein chat one day - once you've got the shelves sorted?

[@paulmayerpiano]

Personally, I believe that RIchter was, first and foremost, a live performer. He was not a recording artist, as he found the studio uninspiring and confessed that he despised analysis (he also confessed that he was obsessed with detail, so, ?). He needed circumstances to align to tap in to his own raw, basic instinct and allow him to really "create in the moment". The repertoire, his mood at the time, the conductor or other musicians (if there were any), and even his relationship with the audience all needed to come together perfectly in order for this to happen. This is terribly risky and temperamental and difficult to achieve - a cruel master indeed. BUT - when it works it is so immensely powerful and compelling that it's practically unforgettable. That is why I hold Richter in such high regard - not because he was a brooding, morose character (there are so many mopey, sad-sack artists who are utterly forgettable), but because when it works I just FEEL it all the way, to the point that it renders analysis moot.

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

Total nonsense. He did some of his very best work in the studio. If you follow any artist around with a microphone and record everything they did you will conclude, based on those rare astonishing live recordings, that they were not "studio" musicians.

[@jdistler2]

Excellent video, and also your 10 best video is right on the money. When you think about this pianist's attitude towards his legacy and the folks obsessed with multiple versions of this or that piece recorded within the same week or month, it really seems as if Richter was The Grateful Dead of classical pianists. And it's interesting that for all of his aversion to microphones, some of his very best recordings stem from the studio, or were carefully culled from professionally engineered live concerts. That's why the little DG box is indeed one's best introduction to Richter. While the 10 best video choices are impeccably curated (and it's amazing how much consensus Dave and I share!), I would also add his studio recordings of such repertory outliers as the Britten Concerto and the Berg Chamber Concerto.

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

So would I! Thanks Jed.

[@quinto34]

His live recording (1986) of Haydn sonatas 2,24,32 and 46 is really special (to me anyways :))...in the end you can smell the rain

[@grantparsons6205]

CDs in bookcases Dave! You've been busy. I recently moved too. A total nightmare. Upside: sorting stuff out has kind of revised my listening preferences as I rediscover things I haven't listened to for years...

[@murraylow4523]

Thanks Dave. I’ll watch the ten best later on. Someone mentioned Rubinstein here as a sort of antithesis of Richter, good idea. You will have your plans for this series but I’d recommend Horowitz as an interesting comparator as there is similarly a bit of a cult and a sense of somebody operating on some other level than most musicians… But whatever the other level is it’s different from Richter! Also there’s that whole Cold War context going on.

[@LeonFleisherFan]

One detail doesn't quite make sense to me. If that were true, why do we hear depth in some recordings, and superficiality in other, when we do not know anything about the artist? I adore Richter because I first heard him as a teenager knowing absolutely nothing about him, and my high school buddy were reeling out of our local concert hall into the cool night (that was a time and we were at a youthful age when we could get cheap tickets to anything, so we did), I mean, wasn't it just music we heard, but we were dumbstruck, it was literally a life changing experience, unforgettable, and no, we weren't impressed by technicalities (neither of us plays an instrument), nor was there anything particularly fascinating about the guy himself, and the program of Prokofiev, Ravel and Scriabin he played was the same he played all around the region these days (as I found out years later, the exact same program was recorded in a concert hall nearby a day or two apart), so if I'd known anything about Richter, I'd have followed him around as long as he was here, who knows, maybe I'd have been disappointed to find out he had off nights as well as ones such as we witnessed, and that basically turned me from a lover of all kinds of music into a classical music record collector. Apart from all that, I agree 100%, as a former student of literature, that a work of art, once it's out there, can and must be judged on its own. In fact, if we judge by biographical details, I'd go so far as to claim this defies the very notion of fiction - it either exists, independently of its creator, or it doesn't, and while it may be interesting to submerse oneself in secondary literature, it's a way of reducing if not belittling a work of art trying to explain its origins.

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

I gather that was a rhetorical question.

[@LeonFleisherFan]

@@DavesClassicalGuideIndeed. In hindsight, from the perspective of a record collector, Sviatoslav Richter is the one artist where it pays off to compare his (too) many performances of the same work to find one's preferred ones. I do not disagree it's a problem, or that one wouldn't prefer if he had not left behind such a discographical mess, but I've learnt so much along the way, going through that (now distant) Richter "phase" and becoming (almost - something or other always seems to pop up or go unnoticed) a completist, it was a fun journey, and I loved every minute of it.

[@javieraguinaga8948]

David, you can tell that your CD room is looking beautiful. And the gong? 

[@jameslee2943]

There's plenty of Richter on KZbin, including some of his Prague recordings 🙂

[@robertdandre94101]

no beethoven in your choice....???? i love his recording of piano concerto no 1 with charles munch and the boston symphonies....and his recording of piano variations ( op 34-35 etc).....and on otheside ,i receive in gift few years ago ,a 50 cd box of melodya ,with recording of sviatoslav richter.( the 100th anniversary edition ) ...nice box,but everyting is write in russian....little bit of the book include give the title in english in the little portion of book

[@francoisjoubert6867]

I wondered what you put put on the list. There is just so much to choose from - I am sure it was not easy just to pick 10. When I started buying CD's, I asked a friend who is the greatest pianist she knew about. She said "Ricther, of course". So I bought all the stuff I could find with him playing. I started with the Beethoven cello sonatas with Rostropovich. Then I bought the Philips Great Pianists Richter Beethoven CD - and got to know sonata 32 that way. Then came the Wanderer and the Trout quintet. Then the Liszt concertos. They day my grandmother died I bought the Prokofiev 5. The Beethoven Tempest sonata - listening to that now. And I wondered if you would talk about the Estampes - it is just wonderful. And when I listen to the Schubert Watertorture sonata (894), I just want to cry. I also love the Mozart/Grieg recording with Leonskaya. I may remember wrongly, but when somebody asked him why he played such inferior music, he said "If it was good enough for Grieg, it is good enough for me." Thanks so much for this series, it is always a game to see "how many am I going to be able to predict".

[@bloodgrss]

I found this so interesting. I remember an interview by Arie Vardi with Yuja Wang some years ago. Now, I will not advocate one way or the other on her (her dress choices, interpretations, etc.) but he said to her that what she brings is 'joy' to playing rather than the tortured expressions and overly pained persona many pianists can have. I think this may be a bit of the answer to the success she has with many fans. I must say, I rather agree with this. Nice to have joy in playing too.

[@chazinko]

You gotta have Richter's Prokofiev 8th Sonata and 5th Concerto (DG), a selection of his Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues (Doremi), Rachmaninoff Preludes & Etude-Tableaux (Eurodisc), 9 Haydn Sonatas (Decca), Scriabin (Warsaw), Mussorgsky Pictures (Sofia, Kiev, Moscow, London or Budapest), Schumann Symphonic Etudes and Debussy Preludes (BBC) Papillons and G minor Sonata & Beethoven op. 2 No. 1 (EMI); Liszt Sonata (BBC) and Mephisto Waltz No. 1, Chopin Scherzi and Schubert D850 and 845 (Melodiya). Tons of great stuff in the Praga box (Liszt Transcendental Etudes, Ravel Miroirs), Parnassus collections (Humoreske) and elsewhere such as the 20th Century Piano Works (Bartok, Hindemith, Szymanowski) on Richter The Master collection. His Prokofiev Violin Sonata in F minor with Oistrakh (Orfeo) is great example of his chamber playing.

[@tarakb7606]

I would also include the Liszt concertos with Kondrashin and the LSO.

[@chazinko]

The Bach Well Tempered Clavier recordings in the remastered Eurodisc box also have some superlative playing.

[@poturbg8698]

Richter seems to have had some serious emotional troubles; at one point he carried around a pink plastic lobster in a satin-lined box that had to be nearby when he played (see NYT article by Errol Morris from 2029). Of course, this has nothing to do with his musicianship.

[@Anonymus-z3z]

Pls, mr Hurwitz, make a video on Glenn Gould.

[@falamimire]

GG?There are many on YT.

[@Tlll123]

Artists’ pr comes into play because, in the end, the difference between performances is 5% at most…