Richter Recitals of Grieg and Debussy

courtesy of Naxos of America

This past Friday Stradivarius Records, an independent Italian record label based in Milan, released a two-CD album of remixed and “denoised” recordings of recital performances by pianist Sviatoslav Richter. Of the 31 tracks in this collection, 25 are devoted to music from the ten volumes of Lyric Pieces composed by Edvard Grieg. The remaining six tracks are from Claude Debussy’s second book of piano preludes. The Debussy performances were recorded in Cosenza in Italy in January of 1993. The Grieg performances were recorded at two different concerts in Greece, in Athens and Kozani, respectively, in October of the same year.

From my own point of view, the Debussy selections made for a useful complement. The first BBC Legends collection included Richter playing ten of the preludes from the first book during a recital in 1961. The respective compositions of the two books of Debussy preludes were separated by about three years, while the Richter performances were separated by about 32 years! On the other hand I would not dare to even try to estimate the number of concert performances Richter gave of Grieg’s Opus 18 concerto in A minor, let alone then number of different recordings. That said, this new Stradivarius release provided me with the first opportunity to listen to his approaches to any of the Lyric Pieces.

Those familiar with those ten volumes (or even excerpts from them) are probably aware of the breadth of different and contrasting dispositions that unfold from one piece to another. Any of them would make for a perfectly satisfying encore following the performance of the concerto. Whether or not Richter came to know the Grieg selections on this new album for encore purposes is left as an exercise for the reader!

What is important is that Richter clearly appreciated that breadth of rhetorical dispositions. One could probably hypothesize a logic for the “journey” that Richter planned with his own sequence of these short pieces. Indeed, there are probably two such journeys with the  applause at the end of Track 14 on the first CD marking the division between the Athens performance and the one a little over a week later in Kozani.

I have now listened to enough Richter recordings to appreciate how he can play precision and expressiveness against each other, not so much as a conflict as a mathematical summation of two vectors pointing in different directions. Each of the two Grieg performances has its own way of unfolding as a well-defined journey. Richter’s approach to Debussy’s second book of preludes, on the other hand, seems to seek out the logic of playing the first five preludes successively and then jumping ahead to the tenth to provide an encore.

My reaction to this new release is that each encounter with a previously unfamiliar Richter album always seems to result in an absorbing journey of discovery.