1966 photograph of Sviatoslav Richter (photograph by Yury Sctherbinin, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)
Given my ongoing interest in the performances of the Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter, I am a bit embarrassed to admit that this was the first morning in which I prowled around YouTube in search of video documents of his recitals. What I found turned out to be a fascinating account of an aspect of his repertoire that particularly interested me, the music of Robert Schumann. Those with long memories may recall that I wrote about the Profil anthology Sviatoslav Richter Plays Schumann & Brahms in April of 2018; but, between the ventures into new repertoire beyond the pieces included in that anthology and the ability to watch Richter in action, there was much to draw my attention to this video.
The video itself was recorded on December 13, 1985 at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Richter had turned 70 at the previous March 20. The performance was one of the offerings scheduled for the December Nights festival. Microphone placement appeared to be minimal but was still effective. For one of the selections Richter was joined by Ludmila Valentinovna Berlinskaya, for whom Richter served as “spiritual father.” They played the fourth and fifth movements (in reverse order) from the Opus 66 set of six impromptus for four-hand piano “Bilder aus Osten” (pictures from the East). This was preceded by Richter’s solo performance of the Opus 19 “Blumenstück” (flower piece) in D-flat major and followed by the last three of the Opus 10 set of six concert studies, all based on the caprices from Niccolò Paganini’s Opus 1. The second half was devoted to a composition I have yet to experience through the physical presence of a recital, the Opus 72 collection of four fugues. For his encore selection Richter returned to more familiar ground, the Opus 7 toccata in C major.
The fugues offer a fascinating perspective on the extent to which Schumann appreciated the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Their respective subjects would not have been out of place in either of the two books of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 846–893); and, among all of the many Richter recordings now in my collection, his account of those 24 preludes and fugues remains high on my list. Nevertheless, the polyphonic unfolding of those subjects is decidedly more Schumann than Bach. Richter clearly knew how to capture Schumann’s spirit in these pieces. Nevertheless, on a few occasions I was uneasy that his phrasing of the subject tended to obscure where Schumann intended the downbeat to be. From that point of view, Richter seemed more at home with the Paganini source themes for the Opus 10 caprices.
On the more positive side I was particularly drawn to the Opus 19 performances. This is one of the better balances of Eusebius and Florestan, Schumann’s fictionalized characters representing the influences of head and heart, respectively; and Richter clearly knew how to give each of those personality types its due. Most importantly, he gave each thematic element is own due expression, in such a way that the listener can appreciate the overall restlessness of the score, juxtaposing pairs of themes in different combinations. Schumann found just the right way to present a deceptively simple surface structure beneath which churned complex elaborations, and Richter was not shy about diving below that surface.
The encore, on the other hand, was more disappointing. Too many times during the performance there was a sense that the intense energy of Schumann’s score for Opus 7 had devolved into mere hammering. There was an overall impression that Richter really did not want to take this encore. It would be unfair to say that he was trying to scold his audience for pushing him into this corner; but, sadly, the prevailing rhetoric of the encore came across as let’s-get-it-over-with.
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