Search - Sviatoslav Richter, Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich :: Sviatoslav Richter in the 1950s, Volume 4

Volume 4 of Parnassus's Sviatoslav Richter in the 1950s lives up to the standards set by its three predecessors. There are no additions to the Richter discography--such as Liszt's "Vallee d'Obermann" or Ravel's "Le Gibet"--which were highlights of the earlier volumes. It's just Richter at his best in performances--new even to aficionados of this pianist--that are often different from Richter at his best in performances familiar to us. Take Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3 in a 1954 performance with the USSR State Symphony led by the great German conductor Hermann Abbendroth. Like his first studio recording in the early 1960s (an out-of-print Deutsche Grammophon disc in which Richter is partnered by another distinguished German, Kurt Sanderling), this is a classically shaped performance. But we also hear some of the ferocious dynamism captured on a Praga disc that Richter displayed in 1956 when he played the piece with the Brno State Philharmonic and conductor Bretislav Bakala. Parnassus's version of Prokofiev's Sixth Sonata shows the pianist operating at a white-hot intensity that surpasses even his performance on Volume 5 of Doremi's Richter series. As Leslie Gerber writes in the program notes, this 1956 performance "captures much of the same furious passion" that some of us heard when the pianist performed this work in Carnegie Hall more than 40 years ago. Everything on these two discs--particularly the pianist's phantasmagorically psychedelic version of Scriabin's "Vers la flamme"--will delight any one interested in the art of the piano. --Stephen Wigler