March 20 was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Sviatoslav Richter, who died in 1997, depressed about a hearing ailment that gave him a false sense of pitch. At the time he was working on Schubert's Five Piano Pieces, D. 459, apparently for the first time. No 20th-century pianist had done more for the rehabilitation of Schubert, the very idea of which sounds absurd today. But I remember well, in the 1950s and 60s, that if anyone so much as spoke of Beethoven and Schubert in the same sentence, it was to identify the second as the lesser.
The Richter anniversary has brought the predictable avalanche of box sets and reissues, any of which someone new to Richter might want to snap up, but first out of the gate among them �" and for Richter fanatics anyway, the most important of the lot �" is Melodiya's four-disc set Richter Plays Schubert Live, Moscow performances from the late 1970s plus the late C Minor Sonata, D. 958, from 1971. Another company with anything as big would have released it by now, so kudos to Melodiya for carrying on its work at the center of Richter's art.
As the idea that Schubert himself may have been gay again recedes in the scholarly view, it's hard not to wonder whether Richter, who would have heard such rumors about the "second-rate" Schubert, gravitated to the composer out of more than musical sympathies. It's now accepted that Richter was gay at a time when homosexuality was as illegal and dangerous in the USSR as it is in Russia today. Bruno Monsaingeon's documentary Richter l'Insoumis (Richter the Enigma) is must watching, and can only enlarge rather than diminish that perspective on the man.
It's helpful to remember that these four discs were not planned as a set, much less as a program. Still, Richter, who had a penchant for performing recitals devoted to a single composer, and ambivalence about the very idea of a "program" apart from that, might have been pleased with this set. Of the late, great sonatas, often grouped today, there are only the "big" G Major, D. 894, and the antepenultimate in C Minor, D. 958. (Their companions are not hard to find on other Richter discs.)
What's striking about all of them is their sure sense of scale. The shorter works are not given the false-Biedermeier treatment, that is, played as decorative near-trifles. Audiences, particularly these days, do want thunder and lightning �" and at least four seasons, a couple of them ideally stormy �" from a piano recital. What the Moscow Conservatory audience of Oct. 18, 1978, got instead from D. 566, 625 and 664 were ultra lucid readings of the three sonatas that �" indirectly �" proved how masterfully crafted they are and also were rich in the mercurial aspects of Richter's playing that made it so beguiling �" startling without having to come at you to make its often surprising effects. There are innumerable examples here of Richter playing a stretch of music as full of phrases as repetitious as the verses in his strophic songs �" and then, over a suspension or rest, taking that music, which seemed to flirt with boredom, and drawing it into a larger musical context. It changed something you'd already heard, and how often does that happen? Playing that seemed "objective," "colorless" or even "boring" bloomed.
The C Minor, the latest sonata on the disc but the earliest in performance date (10/6/71), is perhaps the most revelatory. It and its two successors have, in our time, attained the status of communications from the beyond. A concert of Richard Goode or Mitsuko Uchida playing them can be life-altering. Richter treats them more as a song cycle, with this C Minor the Paradise Lost of a lost trilogy. The exceptional phrasing and terracing of dynamics in the first three movements set the stage for a kind of tarantella in the fourth, in which the listener feels pursued by the subtlest and nimblest of ghosts. The final phrases are breathless.
The fourth disc is a program of one-movement works that together demonstrate that Richter was not only a great Schubert mind, but also the possessor of that "touch" now considered the sine qua non of Schubert pianism. The E-flat Major Impromptu is airborne, and the Thunderous March D. 606 a reminder of what a broad range the composer had.
If Schubert's piano music is new to you, you could do worse than invest in Daniel Barenboim's new 5-disc set, the Schubert Piano Sonatas (DG). Barenboim, who began his career as a pianist of uncommon promise, has gone on to become, arguably (Pierre Boulez, who just turned 90, would be the counterargument) the world's greatest all-around living musician. His Schubert sonatas show the lifetime's thought he's given them, if occasionally also the price of less time to practice.