Playing for small, discerning audiences in venues off the beaten track, Richter often gave of his transcendental best. So it proves here, for the most part. Virtually from the first note the C major Sonata is on a roll – determined and uncompromising, yet never gratuitously aggressive, the intensity not applied as an all-purpose veneer but seemingly generated from the music’s own inner flow. The result is an exultation that seems to be the composer’s rather than the performer’s. And there are more marvels of musical concentration in the Bagatelles, with the B minor, taken at a real presto, passing by in a stream of importunate fury.
Richter launches into the Hammerklavier Sonata before the audience’s welcoming applause has faded. In the first movement he is at his imperious best, albeit with pedalling drier than marked and with a particularly uningratiating tone in the much-used top octave; and his tremendous mastery of timing and touch enables him to sustain an elevated mood throughout the adagio sostenuto. The fugue periodically runs into choppy waters, as it did in the famous Royal Festival Hall performance I heard from around this time (when Richter re-did the movement far more accurately as an encore). Yet this is a struggle that availeth a very great deal, and the moments of clenched-teeth ferocity feel as authentically Beethovenian as the serenity of the slower episodes. The recording is close but not unatmospheric. The alternative Richter Hammerklavier, from Prague and also recorded in 1975, features a memory-blank in the first movement, after which it never quite regains its composure.'