Even by Sviatoslav Richter’s Tours Festival standards 1979 was a red-letter year. Then, partnered by his dazzling young compatriot Andrei Gavrilov, he played Handel’s 16 Suites, offering performances of such quality that long-familiar reservations concerning their provenance and overall success evaporated as if by magic. Fortunately EMI’s engineers were on hand and it is these performances, recorded live, that form the major part of this memorable four-CD reissue. True, only the first eight Suites (or ‘lessons’ as they were learnedly called) were prepared by Handel for publication, the following eight being little more than a hotchpotch, a miscellany haphazardly strung together. Yet from Richter and Gavrilov these baroque chains of dances (Allemande, Courante, Sarabande and Gigue, with the addition of other lighter possibilities) emerge with an unforgettable wit and vitality.
Listen to Gavrilov in the First Suite’s opening Prelude and you will hear an authentic as well as spirited emulation of the extempore style. In the Gigue from the same Suite, too, his identification with Handel’s idiom at its most ebullient is complete. Yet as in his more recent discs of Bach’s French Suites (DG, 7/95) it is in the slow movements that Gavrilov (a sometimes too fearless athlete of the keyboard) achieves his greatest effect. In such hands, the Sarabande from the Seventh Suite becomes Handel’s ‘black pearl’, if you like, and in the same grave and ceremonial dances from Suites Nos. 11 and 13, the music emerges like great mysterious pools of light. Gavrilov’s delicate, unostentatious detache in the first variation of the Menuetto from the Tenth Suite provides another instance of a gentleness so winning that you seem to enter a musical Elysium in which form and content are married in the most subtle and indivisible way. There is none of Gould’s dazzling autocracy in such music, and it is difficult not to sense the influence of Richter, the inspiring and presiding spirit behind this occasion.
Richter’s genius has rarely sounded more imperturbable and, whether he is playful and resilient in, say, the Fifth Suite’s Gigue or poised and tonally translucent – a model of sense and sensibility – in the Air con Variazione (the famous Harmonious Blacksmith Variations), you are always aware of the musical artist first and the transcendental pianist second (the reverse, surely, of Rachmaninov’s celebrated recording of the same variations – RCA, 3/93). Tempos are judicious rather than extreme, and even the most determined Beckmesser will surely find himself abandoning pencil and paper and succumbing to the spell of such serenity and affection.
Finally, as a further reminder of Richter’s unique stature there is his legendary 1961 disc of Beethoven’s D minor Sonata, Op. 31 No. 2. Rarely can Beethoven’s suggestion that we should read Shakespeare’s The Tempest (a metaphysical fantasy concerned with the mystery of death and rebirth) have seemed more teasing or obtuse. In any event, from Richter the music retains its mystery, its eloquence ‘contained’ to the point of enigma. Richter ‘does’ so little and the result is hauntingly pure and distilled.
The recordings, though occasionally showing their age, have been beautifully transferred and I for one will return to all four discs for endless refreshment and enlightenment.'