BBC Legends 3: Sviatoslav Richter Recitals

The ninth installment in the latest BBC Legends series is devoted entirely to pianist Sviatoslav Richter. The recordings were made during two recitals in the Royal Festival Hall. The first of these took place on January 27, 1963 and accounted for compositions by Robert Schumann and Frédéric Chopin. The second took place a little less than a week later on February 2. That program was divided between Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert. The CD presents these two recitals in reverse chronological order, preferring to order the composers chronologically.

I was struck by the fact that Chopin was represented by one a single short composition, probably as an encore selection. Richter played the fourth of the Opus 10 études in the key of C-sharp minor. This amounts to a “pedagogical” selection. However, the Schumann selections were the Opus 1 set of “Abegg” variations, followed by the Opus 26 tone poem Faschingsschwank aus Wien (carnival scenes from Vienna). Both of these are physically demanding compositions. Perhaps Richter had decided to play with his audience by letting them known that, after jumping through all of Schumann’s hoops, he could still deal with a Chopin étude as if it were a walk in the park!

The Beethoven-Schubert pairing appealed more to my personal tastes. There is a fair amount of playfulness in the two Opus 14 sonatas that he performed. In that spirit one gets the impression that Richter himself was “playing around” with how to differentiate foreground and background. This involved some approaches to emphasis that one might not have expected of other pianists. In other words Richter wanted to throw new lights on these two sonatas to remind his audience that he had his own ways of approaching Beethoven.

He could then launch into Schubert’s D. 760 “Wanderer” fantasy in C major with an initial intensity that was probably his way to declaiming to the audience “Beethoven’s over!” Mind you, there is at least one anecdote that D. 760 was such a wild ride that Schubert himself could not play it. Richter certainly did not intend to downplay Schubert’s intensity. However, he had clearly thought through an overall phrasing strategy to provide a foundation for how he would manage the wide swings of dynamic range. The fact is that Richter had clearly put considerable thought into not only the overall architecture but also the many details, several of which might be overlooked by other pianists.

By now I have lost count of how many recordings I have of how many pianists playing D. 760, but this particular Richter performance is one that I would gladly revisit.

2015 Ukrainian stamp issued to commemorate Richter’s birth (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Things being what they are as I write this, I feel it is important to note that this “prominent Russian pianist” was actually born in Ukraine; and, as will be seen above, the country commemorated the centennial of his birth with a postage stamp!