Forced to select the greatest of Richter’s performances for a two-disc set (or even several such) I’m not sure I’d know where to begin. Philips, understandably, have looked to their own label and recycled his famous 1958 Sofia recital.
Even at the height of his powers he could be an erratic player, but on this occasion the force was with him from first note until last. Not only did the recital help to spread the Richter ‘legend’ in the months leading up to his much-hyped London and New York debuts in 1960, his Mussorgsky Pictures made a decisive contribution to the rehabilitation of that piece as a staple of the piano repertoire. Here is virtuosity entirely at the service of the music, defying anyone to say a word against Mussorgsky’s pianistic imagination or to want to hear Ravel’s orchestral make-over ever again.
The rest of the recital displays Richter’s view of the romantic repertoire at its first mature flowering, after a period of occasionally experimental overstatement and before its (also only occasional) rigidification. His Schubert, Chopin and Liszt share a common core of determined resistance to buffeting emotions. Yet on the surface his Schubert is as beautiful and refined as anyone’s (no controversial tempos either); the possibly disconcerting intensity of his Chopin is built strictly around the composer’s expression markings; and as all collectors of recorded piano music already know, his Liszt “Feux follets” remains a benchmark performance to this day.
Keeping up with the ever-burgeoning Richter discography is virtually a full-time occupation, and I couldn’t swear that the versions of the Prokofiev sonatas presented here are the absolute best available, though I suspect they are. He was in at the birth, or nearly so, of all three pieces, and his identification with their expressive worlds is complete. Defiance and unstoppable momentum are at the heart of the matter, and virtuosity of the highest order is pressed into the service of those core values. I doubt whether anyone has taken the Scherzo of the Sixth Sonata more convincingly at this tempo (the fast end of allegretto), for instance, or found more wide-ranging yet integrated drama in all three movements of the Eighth.
You could certainly wish for more refined recording quality on the first disc, though my old LPs sound a good deal worse and the Prokofiev sonatas are well enough recorded, especially the Eighth. Overall it’s difficult to imagine a truer encapsulation of the Richter phenomenon. If by any chance you have missed these recordings in past incarnations you now have an opportunity not to be passed up.'