There can surely be no doubt as to Richter's current status as elder statesman of the piano world. And collectors now have a bewildering array of recent, mainly live performances and reissues to choose from. (I assume that Philips's deletion of his Sofia Mussorgsky Pictures and his Budapest Liszt Sonata means that they will be reappearing on a budget label—they are all-time classic performances which no serious devotee of piano music should be without.)
Some of these issues are inspiring and indispensable—the DG Prokofiev and Scriabin sonatas (9/88) and Rachmaninov and Prokofiev concertos (6/85), the RCA Brahms Second Concerto (5/88), the Pyramid Beethoven (3/91), the Olympia Schubert and Schumann (10/92); I could go on. Three-quarters of EMI's latest four-disc compilation falls into that category. Other issues have to be scrutinized more carefully, and that is very much the case with the six new Decca discs.
436 451-2DH2: The two-disc set of twentieth-century works raised my highest hopes and dashed them most completely. That has little to do with the music, though the Hindemith Suite is very nearly beyond my personal pale, and less still to do with the playing, which has more moments of technical discomfort than would have assailed the Richter of old, but which is still highly characteristic in its fierce, uncompromising intensity. The problem is that the microphones seem to have been placed in the lap of a member of the audience sitting on the squeakiest chair in Vienna's Yamaha Centre applause is deafening, audience noise is plentiful, the piano sound itself is distant and desiccated. There is certainly some hypnotic playing here, but be warned that aural distractions are extreme.
436 454/5-2DH: Richter's Haydn presents some serious stylistic obstacles. His basic approach is hard-hitting and devoid of grace, and there are numerous dubious readings of the text. In compensation there are willpower, determination and a ruthless exclusion of anything extraneous to the musical substance. Slow movements in particular have a meditative concentration which is absolutely compelling, somehow even the slightest of these sonatas sounds more 'important' this way. Recording quality is variable. Of the Mantua Haydn discs 436 454-2DH is fine, but 436 455-2DH is a real curate's egg. Here only the A flat Sonata comes out reasonably well, though the B flat is intriguing—at first I thought I was hearing traffic noise followed by intermittent hiss, now I rather think it's thunder followed by intermittent torrential rain.
436 456-2DH: Richter's Schumann is too celebrated to need my further praise. For this disc he has selected what many might regard as the poor relations in the oeuvre, and in so doing he both encourages reassessment and offers collectors the chance to plug some gaps. The obvious exception is the Toccata, which is robust and exhilarating but nothing like the tour de force of his famous 1962 DG account (11 /92). Richter's art thrives on self-denial—which is not to say that you have to be a masochist to enjoy it, but rather that passing details are subordinated to a transcendental flow. The Four Fugues can rarely if ever have sounded so elevated, for example, and Richter's penetration into the private worlds of the Blumenstuck and Vier Nachtstucke is complete. Recording quality both here and in the Brahms sonatas (from the same location) is fine, if on the shallow side.
436 457-2DH: Immense rhythmic resilience, structural far-sightedness and depth of tone-production have always been among Richter's greatest strengths, and in the two early Brahms sonatas those are precious assets. If the stresses and strains are now more conspicuous than they once would have been, that too chimes in with the truculence and cussedness of the young Brahms. Flawless fluency it isn't, but rare indeed is the Brahms playing which is built on such a rock-like foundation.
Un Portrait: The only serious problem with the EMI set is what to do if you already own some of the recordings. The Schubert Wanderer Fantasy and A major Sonata demand a place on the shortest of shortlists of great recordings, and the recording quality in Paris's Salle Wagram out-classes anything on the Decca issues. Some would give the same accolade to Richter's Schumann Fantasie, but to me it sounds more constricted, both as an interpretation and as a recording. The remaining Schumann works impress me more. Exultation and impetuosity, of a kind not generally associated with the more recent Richter characterize the G minor Sonata; Papillons is a model of poetry without effeminacy; and Faschingsschwank aus Wien sweeps you off your feet (though the' sudden silences in the gaps between movements are offputting, as is the brief moment in the ''Intermezzo'', at 0'25'', where the piano sounds as though it has been double-tracked—overlaid with another recording of itself).
The Beethoven disc is another example of almost superhuman objectivity. Both the Op. 10 No. 3 and Tempest Sonatas are more spontaneous-sounding and better recorded on the more recent Pyramid discs I mentioned earlier but the prestissimo finale of the F minor Sonata and the Andante favori are, in their opposite ways, examples of near-miraculous Beethoven pianism. I would be hard put to choose between the aforementioned 1959 DG Prokofiev concerto and the 1971 LSO/Maazel on offer here, though they are in fact quite strikingly different, especially in the LSO's much more reined-in (and strikingly effective) tempo for the second movement. But the Berg Chamber Concerto is simply in a class of its own—not just for Richter's towering account of the piano part, but for Oleg Kagan's breathtaking poetry in the slow movement and for the hyper-sensitive shadings of the Moscow Conservatoire Instrumental Ensemble. Unlike most Western performances this one sounds rehearsed to the point where all the players are aware of their place in the texture and of the expressive import of the notes. The interpretation totally disregards Berg's metronome markings and simply phrases the music for all the hallucinatory beauty and rhetoric it can find, and to my mind the result stands head and shoulders above any other recording of the work. While I suppose it would be silly to say that the set is worth the price for this performance alone, I would certainly say that it is one of the three or four greatest Berg recordings I know.'