Word: pianist
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...there a more stimulating, captivating and exasperating pianist than Sviatoslav Richter? When the reclusive Ukrainian-born musician -- the last of the Soviet-era superstars -- is good, he's very, very good. And when he's bad, he's horrid. But in an age of cookie-cutter pianists, each playing the same program in the same way, Richter, at least, is gloriously himself...
...numbers and selling for about $350. The tapes, which cover a span of a quarter-century and include both live and studio recordings, were discovered unmarked and unedited in the company's vaults in Holland in 1993 and were released earlier this fall with the imprimatur of the temperamental pianist. The music represents the heart of his repertoire: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Schubert, Haydn, Weber, Chopin, Liszt, Scriabin, Prokofiev and Shostakovich. There is probably no better compendium of Richter...
...pianist, who is 79, was already a legend by the time he burst onto the international scene in 1960 with concerts in Finland and America. Like his late Soviet compatriot Emil Gilels, he had been a student of Heinrich Neuhaus' at the Moscow Conservatory, where he met Prokofiev and premiered the composer's Sixth, Seventh and Ninth piano sonatas. Unlike most of the fire- breathing Soviet wunderkinder, though, Richter came to the piano late, originally planning a career as a conductor; until he went to study with Neuhaus at age 21, he was largely self-taught...
...also consume arrowroot cookies with ketchup, voraciously take tranquilizers by the dozen and spend hours on the telephone calling anyone at anytime just to talk. In his elliptically eccentric little film, director Francois Girard composes a series of thirty-two short compositions that capture the intense peculiarities of the pianist's insanely tortured and brilliant life. The director's minimalist documentary style, while ostensibly unassuming, is as intense as the Gouldian world it unfolds for us on the screen. The film's fragments wrap us up and then just as quickly unwind--the detached psychological probing is as disorienting...
...medical health. Shots of a NASA flights are mixed with various interviews with people who knew Gould's peculiar persona. Not only are these effective diversions a way of introducing the musical variation of the film itself, but also they serve to highlight the odds and ends of the pianist's existence. The facts are here, but they are woven within a whirl of visual images and musical fleetings...