The legendary Russian pianist would have been 100 this week. Tom Service picks ten of his essential performances that introduce you to the genius of Sviatoslav Richter

One hundred years ago this week the great, the legendary, the enigmatic Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter was born. Richter lived with the paradox that all great performers must: that their recreative powers are seen and heard to transcend the music they are playing. That’s despite how forcefully he insisted on his absolute fidelity to the score, as if audiences should really hear only the unvarnished and immutable truths of the notes that Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven, Bach, or Prokofiev wrote rather than Richter’s own “interpretation”. But that can only ever be partly true, even if it’s a useful or even essential fiction that Richter needed to tell himself. (The pianist and writer Ken Hamilton certainly believes that was Richter’s strategy, as he told Andrew McGregor on last Saturday’s CD Review on Radio 3.) That’s because Richter’s approach resulted in some of the most distinctive and individual performances of the piano repertoire ever recorded. And it’s also because the truths that Richter was after were themselves historically mediated ideas: the supposedly timeless qualities of scores by Mozart, Beethoven, or Schubert, say, that are anything but “timeless”, and are in fact enmeshed in historical contingencies, let alone the vagaries of published editions and performance practice conditions, and the fact that none of those composers would recognise the piano Richter was using, the way it was tuned (the equal temperament that all our pianos are forced into these days was not a popular choice among musicians until the late 19th century), or the conditions of his concert life.

Or try this one for size: as Zuzana Ružicková revealed in Mahan Esfahani’s radio documentary Mission Harpsichord, Richter’s performances of Prokofiev’s piano sonatas (the 9th of which is dedicated to him), were completely different in their austerity and objectivity from the romanticism and freedom of Prokofiev’s own playing of these pieces. Who was right, composer or “interpreter”?

All of which pseudo-philosophical dancing on the head of a pin is frankly brushed aside by the power of Richter’s playing, as you’ll hear in these 10 examples I’ve chosen from hundreds of possible performances to curate my own Richter-fest. It’s precisely Richter’s certainty, his integrity, the fact that music seems to speak with an Olympian objectivity at the same time as an impossible-sounding lyricism and sustained tone (listen to his extraordinarily slow yet convincing Schubert sonatas), without ever a shred of indulgence in virtuosity or sensuality for its own sake, that makes these performances definitively Richterian. That’s the point about his musicianship: its strength of conviction and imagination makes you believe when you’re listening to him that this really is the way the music has to go, that what you’re hearing truly is the fundamental core of these pieces.

1. Bach: Well-Tempered Clavier

Richter’s monumental 1992 complete recording of Bach’s 48.

2. Brahms: Piano Concerto no 2

A recording from 1960 (with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Erich Leinsdorf) that Richter was apparently unhappy with. It’s hard to hear why - this is a fearless, patina-stripping revelation of Brahms’s great concerto.

3. Mendelssohn: Variations sérieuses

Filmed in 1965, this is a close-up encounter with Richter’s virtuosity.

4. Prokofiev: Sonata no 7

A Soviet recording of Prokofiev’s magnificent, motoric sonata.

5. Schubert: Sonata in G major, D894

From the Aldeburgh Festival in 1977, one of the most marmoreal, meditative, and moving performances of a Schubert sonata that I know.

6. Beethoven: Sonata op 2 no 3, Hammerklavier, and Bagatelles op 126

Recorded at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1975, this is a performance of the Hammerklavier that sears you emotionally, intellectually and spiritually.

7. Mozart: Sonata for 2 Pianos, K448

With Benjamin Britten, some of the most joyous and infectious music-making of Richter’s life.

8. Schubert: Sonata in B flat, D960

Richter’s studio recording from 1972, a performance that’s both intimate and shattering.

9. Chopin Ballades, Etudes

From Kiev in 1959 and 1960, illuminating Richter’s simultaneously structural and improvisatory approach to Chopin.

10. Rachmaninov, Piano Concerto no 2

One of the classics of the post-war recorded legacy, but no less fascinating for its familiarity. The performance (made in 1959 with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra under Stanislaw Woslicki) proves the power of the Richterian ideals of his own kind of fidelity to the text, his refusal to accept conventions at face value, and his absolute insistence on technical and architectural clarity. It’s a multi-dimensional cocktail that turns this concerto into one of the most thrillingly emotional experiences of Richter’s entire discography.

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