"The rhythm in Richter's performances makes one feel that the whole work lies before him like an immense landscape, revealed to the eye at a single glance"Heinrich Neuhaus
Born: 20 March 1915, Zhitomir (near Kiev)
Died: 1 August 1997, Moscow
Ukrainian pianist Sviatoslav Richter was soon dubbed "notoriously unreliable" - cancelling concerts almost every year (often at the last moment) or changing his whole programme. But there were always inner constraints or health reasons, and ultimately it has not harmed his reputation as one of the world's finest pianists.
As a boy, Richter had only sporadic piano lessons, yet a natural, insatiable curiosity about everything to do with music helped him on his way until he began as a repetiteur at the Odessa Opera when he was eighteen. This period endowed him with a knowledge of opera unusual in a pianist and taught him how to make the piano "sing". The same year he began rehearsing the piano literature in earnest, gibing his first public recital - still self-taught - the following year. At twenty-two he entered the Moscow Conservatory, as a pupil of Heinrich Neuhaus, and under the latter's intelligent direction he matured into a professional, without losing his originality.
His phenomenal sight-reading, which, like his remarkable memory and fascinating musical instinct, marked out this "born" pianist, thrilled Neuhaus: "The rhythm in Richter's performances makes one feel that the whole work, even if it is of gigantic proportions, lies before him like an immense landscape, revealed to the eye at a single glance and in all its details."
Though really too old to start a concert career, Richter - first in Eastern Europe, then from 1960 in the West and Japan - was a global sensation. Take his first concert in Finland: "After the first sonata, there was enormous applause; after the next one they started tapping their feet, which, in Helsinki, is their expression of the utmost admiration, and after the 'Appassionata' one feared that the floor might give away". The 1960's showed Richter at the height of his powers, but the punishing concert schedule he imposed upon himself undermined his health.
Audience and press were constantly enthralled anew by Richter's playing, offered "in affectionate service to the composer as a first and last aim", as a reviewer once wrote, and as late as 1989 the London press said of the seventy-four-year-old that he had the most perfect technique ever applied to the keyboard. Though Richter said he hated making recordings, over 50 are currently available, many of them milestones of pianistic history.
In: http://www.deccaclassics.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment