Some while ago, before giving a recital in Venice, Richter asked the theatre management to make an announcement changing the reference to him in the programme as a ‘Ukrainian pianist’ to ‘Soviet citizen of German nationality’. His father was from a German family of musicians and had lived in Vienna for 20 years before moving to Zhitomir. He perished at Stalin’s hands in 1941. His mother, fleeing thereafter to Germany, was without news of her son until well after the Second World War. The grim facts are almost certainly the reason why the Soviet authorities confined Richter to the then USSR and Eastern bloc countries for so long. When he first played in this country, in 1961, he was 46 and had only recently seen his mother for the first time in 20 years.

He embarked on the career of solo pianist quite late, having started his professional life as a répétiteur at the Odessa Opera House, and he was 22 before he began formal training at the Moscow Conservatory as a pupil of Heinrich Neuhaus. In his early years he seems to have been largely self-taught. He always acknowledged his debt to Neuhaus as friend and mentor (and father-figure?), while Neuhaus, wise man that he was, adopted a role of ‘benevolent neutrality’ and said that it would have been absurd to try to teach  – in the conventional sense – a pupil of such phenomenal natural gifts.

Richter’s friendship with Prokofiev dates back to these student years, and Prokofiev entrusted him with the premieres of the Sixth and Seventh Sonatas and wrote the Ninth Sonata for him (Emil Gilels had the Eighth).

When Richter first played in London his reputation had preceded him. The evening in which he played the two Liszt concertos at the Royal Albert Hall was wonderful; so was another when he did the Chopin Andante spianato and Grande Polonaise and the Dvořák Concerto (in the original version, and with the finale given again as an encore); and I remember too every note of his first recital at the Royal Festival Hall (Haydn and Prokofiev, which struck people as a very odd programme to do then). But it was meaningless to proclaim him as the greatest living pianist – even before he had been heard in the West, as some did  – and it was certainly unhelpful to such a sensitive and deeply serious artist as Richter. Temperamentally he was quite unsuited to coping with the glitz of the music business and the cult status that was thrust upon him, from which indeed he did everything to distance himself. People’s nonmusical expectations had caused enough problems for Horowitz, heaven knows!

I sometimes wonder whether matters would have worked out differently if he could have had a career which developed at the pace he wanted. In the years of his full maturity there were still times when he played in big concert-halls, and with orchestras, and when the making of records was part of his work. He continued to play at some festivals, notably at Aldeburgh, but more and more he withdrew, to small halls and small places, well away from the beaten track – for part of each summer to the old grange at Meslay in the Touraine countryside, where he founded a festival of his own. He also made his own tours. I believe it was in 1986, when well past 70, that he travelled east from Moscow for months on end, across Siberia (the piano following behind), giving whistle-stop concerts in places some of which had never had a piano recital before, let alone an evening of (for example) the first two Brahms sonatas and the Brahms Paganini Variations, or Bach English Suites and Debussy Etudes.

He was a wanderer and you could never be sure where he would turn up next, or what he would be playing. But travel he did, and with a huge range of music – that too was part of the job, as he saw it. I caught him in Warsaw about 20 years ago, during the Warsaw Autumn Festival, giving an all-Prokofiev recital at the Music School one morning, taking part in a Szymanowski concert and accompanying some songs the next day, doing the Hindemith Kammerkonzert No. 2 for piano and 12 instruments in another programme, partnering Yuri Bashmet in the Shostakovich Viola Sonata in yet another, and finally joining Oleg Kagan and a wind ensemble of students from Moscow in the Berg Chamber Concerto. Nearer home, in rural Essex, I saw one day that he was down to play in Thaxted Parish church the following week. On his last visits to London you might have caught him at St James’s, Piccadilly, or the National Gallery, or the Britten Theatre of the Royal College of Music. By then he had retreated into darkness and was almost invisible as he played, having adjusted an angle poise lamp at his side so that the only light on the platform fell on the music-rest. ‘You shall not look at me,’ he seemed to be saying ‘I follow the text, and the music shall be enough.’

He declined as his health failed, but he was an artist I always wanted to hear. One followed him, and it was rare to come away from his programmes without the experience of something special, even if not everything had been memorable (he was fallible, and on occasion inscrutable, and at times the text seemed to be about all one got). Fortunately, microphones often followed him as well. The 21 CDs comprising ‘The Authorized Recordings’ of Richter in the set Philips put together in 1994 (reviewed 8/94) track a good deal of the activity of the 1980s and 1990s, with a few things from before. But they do not tell the whole story. Many recordings from much earlier (even if the sound is poor) are essential documents of a professional life which spanned 50 years, and Richter did things in the 1950s, before we knew him in the West, that he never surpassed. The 1950s, 1960s and 1970s were probably his best time. The first recordings he made in London, in the early 1960s, are among my favourites – the Schumann Fantasie, above all, and the Liszt concertos with the LSO and Kondrashin. Nor should one forget that he was a splendid collaborator in chamber music and a partner to singers, notably to Fischer-Dieskau and Peter Schreier. But now that he is gone there will be time enough, a little later, for full critical assessments.

Heinrich Neuhaus said that the great problem of performance is Time-Rhythm – with capital letters – where the unit for measuring the rhythm of the music is not the bar, or the phrase, the period or the movement, but the composition as a whole – ‘where the musical work and its rhythm are almost identical’. That is why Neuhaus admired so much the rhythm of Richter’s performances: ‘one feels clearly that the whole work, even if it is of gigantic proportions, lies before him like an immense landscape, revealed to the eye at a single glance and in all its details from the eagle’s flight, from a tremendous height and at an incredible speed’. That is well said. Clearly, there was more than piano playing to Richter. He surveyed a huge domain and, at his best, could play a lot of composers like a god. When he took wing, and head, heart and hand came together in those vertiginous flights, as they often did, you felt there was no one quite to touch him.

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