Search - Sviatoslav Richter :: At the Aldeburgh Festival 1966

Distinguished refinement, peerless pianism!

Hiram Gomez Pardo | Valencia, Venezuela | 08/01/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

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In 1977 Yakov Milstein wrote: "Richter the pianist hears music as a conductor does; he treats his instrument as an orchestra. Hence his mastery of the tonal perspective, color shading and astonishingly accurate with a constructive sense of rhythm has always excited his listener's admiration."



That observation should not astonish us: Nowadays, we have a crowd of emblematic cases: Vladimir Ashkenazy, Paul Badura Skoda, Murray Perahia and Daniel Barenboim have enriched their respective musical palettes, because precisely of the fact both roles are complementary, never opposed. When you conduct a work from the piano you, you necessarily achieve new perspectives and approaches respect a determined work.



In spite of the fact Richter never conducted, we might say, with plain security the orchestra turned around him. In this recital from Aldeburgh festival 1966, you may sense how Richter reinvented himself every time he played determined composer. His Mozart sounds so crystalline, with transparent phrasing and engaging conviction, so naïf, (in the best sense of the word) without losing any bit of delicateness and expression. He transformed this pleasant trifle into a great gem, plenty of importance, sumptuousness and grandness per se.



We know about Richter' s Schubert always sounded newness, as if effectively Slava himself would have partaken about the process of composition.



Richter' s Liszt was always synonymous of untamed perfection, expressive balance, tonal texture and profound sentiment. His tremolos, trills, octaves and arpeggios were always faultless. The robust sonority and the superb fugato in the central section was always motive of the best praises and enviable admiration by countless people. In this special performance, Richter displays with formidable rush a true outburst of reflective lyricism and an absolute domain of the rhythmic pulse, expressing the duel between Faust and Mephistopheles with mesmerizing subtleness. He literally builds an enormous canvas where designs, molds and expresses with sheer elegance the struggling conflict, the lovable atmosphere between Faust and Margarita. The overall result has been one of the most electrifying performances about this Op. ever made.



A CD that demands urgently to be heard.

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