Richter Recitals of Haydn and Mozart

courtesy of Naxos of America

This has been a good month for attentive listeners following the recordings of Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter. As I reported this past Thursday, Profil released its latest “anthology album” of Richter recordings, which I called the “assorted Russians collection.” At the same time Stradivarius released its latest CD of recital performances of compositions by Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The Haydn performances were recorded in the French city of Jouques at the Abbaye Notre-Dame-de-Fidélité de Jouques on February 22, 1992. The Mozart selections were performed at the concert hall in the Swiss city of Zug on October 2, 1991.

The music performed at each of these recitals will probably be familiar to most of those interested in the First Viennese School repertoire. However, it is still interesting to observe that only one of the four pieces was not in the key of C minor. Personally, I think that the preference for the key is more significant in the Mozart recital, but readers can draw their own conclusions.

The reason for my opinion is that Richter decided to couple the K. 475 fantasia with the K. 457 three-movement sonata. He is far from the first pianist to perform this coupling. The basic idea is that K. 475 provides a sort of “free-form overture” to introduce the more structured movements of the K. 457 sonata. Whether Mozart himself considered this coupling is anybody’s guess, but Richter certainly makes a convincing case for it.

Personally, however, I tend to be drawn to the Haydn sonata, Hoboken XVI/20. The mere fact that the tempo of the first movement is Moderato alerts my “Spider-Sense” that this will not be any ordinary piano sonata. Furthermore, I like to believe that Johannes Brahms knew about this sonata, played it for himself, and probably reacted the same way. Indeed, the opening phrase of the sonata may well have inspired the solo cello passage that begins the third movement of Brahms’ Opus 83 (second) piano concerto in B-flat major.

Indeed, Brahms was so taken with the theme that he repurposed it for the second of his Opus 105 songs, “Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer” (my slumber grows ever more peaceful). For that matter, Haydn was enough of a prankster that one can wonder whether he intended this movement to be soothly peaceful and nervously disquieting at the same time! That same sense of disquiet can be found in the F minor theme for the Hoboken XVII/6 set of variations, which may explain why Richter chose to couple these to pieces for his French recital.

I suppose one of the reasons that I chase after Richter recordings when I learn that they have been released is that, one way or another, he tends push me into new perspectives in listening to music that I previously thought was totally familiar, if not a bit shopworn. These days I do not encounter many performers or recordings that trigger such a response, particularly where Haydn is concerned. (The one Haydn performer that seems to get my attention consistently these days is Emanuel Ax.) I suspect that I shall be drawn to revisit this new Stradivarius release when I feel that my “little grey cells” are in need of a workout.