It is 20 years this month since Sviatoslav Richter died, aged 82. Few pianists have been as extensively chronicled on disc as he has been, with a profusion of studio and concert recordings, so that there are few corners of his vast repertoire which are not documented. But the Profil set concentrates on the early part of his career, which is rather less well covered than his later appearances. Though a few tapes of studio sessions in Paris are included as an extra, most of these performances of Schubert come from concerts given in Moscow, never available on disc before. The earliest dates from 1948, before Richter had performed outside the Soviet Union, and the latest from 1963, by which time his international reputation had been firmly established in tours of western Europe and the US.
That the whole set is devoted to Schubert is interesting in itself. It shows that performances of Schubert’s sonatas, which are so well known from recordings of Richter’s later recitals, were always a major element in his programmes. Chopin and Rachmaninov were apparently the composers who featured most regularly in his solo concerts, with Debussy and Beethoven not far behind. Schubert does not make it into the top 10. Yet as these performances show, Richter clearly felt a special affinity for this often introspective music.
The 10 discs here do not offer a comprehensive survey of the sonatas, and a couple of the omissions are notable. Richter appears never to have played the late A major Sonata D959 – it’s one of the odd gaps in his repertoire, like Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata – but he certainly did play the G major D894, and that is an absentee too. But there are two performances of the final B flat Sonata, as serene and measured, every repeat observed, as the famous later recording, as well as two extraordinary, titanic accounts of the Wanderer Fantasy.
Not everything is totally convincing – the first movement of the A minor Sonata D845 is dogged, almost plodding, while the opening of the D major D850 seems too hasty, despite the dazzling clarity of the playing. But those are minor flaws, and the set is completed with a disc of impromptus, another of miniatures and a final one that includes the A flat major Variations for piano duet, in which Richter partnered Benjamin Britten on his 1963 visit to Moscow, and six songs, including two from Winterreise and two from Schwanengesang, in which he accompanies soprano Nina Dorliac, with whom he lived from 1945 until his death. For Richter devotees it has to be a compulsory purchase.
