Richter reissues and
discoveries continue to pour in from
all sides. This one proclaims "Richter’s
only released recordings ever of Mendelssohn’s
Songs without Words, Chopin’s Nocturne
no. 1 and Debussy’s Hommage à
Haydn", which sounds like a red-letter
day for Richterites. Well, "Up
to a point, Lord Copper".
It’s a strange thing,
but I’ve heard dreadful recordings,
classic ladies’ handbaggers, including
some of Richter, where, in spite of
the murk, "through a glass, dimly",
one was left in no doubt that great
and wonderful things were taking place.
This one certainly didn’t come from
any lady’s handbag. The microphone is
oppressively close to the piano in the
Schubert and for the rest of the programme
seems to have been actually inside it.
We have heard recordings in which Richter
span a liquid legato, every note a pool
of light. Here every note has an aggressive
ping, those above mezzoforte suggestive
of breaking crockery. If it were not
that an audience can occasionally be
heard coughing in the far distance,
and applauding the pieces, I might have
supposed that I was hearing a cheap
modern upright recorded in a tiny padded
cell of a studio on a small portable
recorder. How has this come about?
I can think of two
ways. In countries where there is no
Musician’s Union to keep a beady eye
open for untoward recording activity,
people even plonk their little cassette
recorders right up on the stage without
any objection being made (they were
still doing this in Italy in the 1980s).
If the source was something like this,
then maybe Doremi have done miracles
to make it sound even as good as it
does. However, those little recorders
inevitably produce a lot of wow, and
the sound here is at least firm and
steady. Which makes me look for another
solution, and I wonder if this is a
perfectly respectable radio broadcast
that has been aggressively cleaned up,
for the sound is remarkably similar
to what you get if you apply a very
high level of dehissing and denoising
(certainly there is suspiciously little
hiss or noise for an analogical recording),
consequently squeezing out all the natural
ambience together with the other noises,
and then try to "correct"
the resultant muffled sound by increasing
the upper partials and raising the brilliance
enhancer. The effect is totally artificial,
just as it is here, where Richter actually
seems to be playing an electronic piano.
If this second explanation is true,
then there remains some slight hope
that we may one day hear this recital
in more palatable sound.
And yet, I get the
idea that Richter himself was in one
of his enigmatically unyielding moods
for much of the evening. After all,
there are brief patches of delicate
playing in the Scherzo of the Schubert,
so presumably the microphone would have
registered others had they been there.
Of course, if you want your Schubert
with Viennese charm and schmaltz, you
won’t go to Richter in the first place,
and there is a granitic purposefulness
to the first movement which is impressive,
but I don’t see how improved recording
could transform his Prokofief toccata-like
onslaught on the finale into anything
but a devastatingly insensitive demolition
of the music.
Similarly, there is
real Richter magic in the last of the
Mendelssohn pieces, the G minor Gondola
Song, raising the doubt that the grumpiness
of no. 2 is a true picture, and
I don’t see how you could define no.
3 (the so-called "Hunting-Song")
as other than relentless piano-bashing,
and none too accurate either.
Thereafter things are
much better. The unpleasantness of the
fortes (not too numerous, luckily) cannot
hide the fact that the Chopin is unfolded
with miraculous calm (and remember that
we have no other source for Richter
playing this) and that the first Image,
"Reflets dans l’eau" is wonderfully
poised and iridescent at a tempo that
would spell disaster for most of us.
While we may reasonably prefer other
Richter versions of the Images, if our
only opportunity to hear him play "Hommage
à Haydn" is to be this one,
it is more welcome than not. "L’isle
joyeuse" is incredibly clear but
the ending has, as recorded, a Stravinsky-like
brittleness.
Fully paid-up Richterites
will want this anyway, and will know
how to judge it. As an introduction
to Richter’s art it is actually dangerous
and could well give a quite misleading
impression. You have been warned.
Christopher Howell
Sviatoslav Richter (piano) 
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