Word: richter
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...world's most fabled and, internationally, the least widely heard pianist is 44-year-old Russian Sviatoslav Richter. Most Westerners who have managed to attend one of his concerts are convinced that he is one of the greatest pianists now playing. But unlike such famed Russian contemporaries as Pianist Emil Gilels and Violinist David Oistrakh, Richter is not a Communist Party member and has never been allowed to travel to the West. Last week the West traveled to Richter. In Leningrad the touring Philadelphia Orchestra (TIME, June 9) joined him in a performance of Prokofiev's prickly, sardonic...
...Genius." Irreverent sophisticates of the concert halls may laugh at Van-but not when he sits down to play. Pianist Sviatoslav Richter, whom the Russians regard as their best, dubbed Van "a genius -a word I do not use lightly about performers." In tears of emotion Pianist Emil Gilels grabbed Van as he came off the stage after playing Rachmaninoff's Third Concerto, bussed him soundly on both cheeks. To Composer Aram Khachaturian, Van was "better than Rachmaninoff; you find a virtuoso like this only once or twice in a century." France's Marquis de Gontaut-Biron...
...superb. The enormous hands cover a twelve-note span. He has a dazzling warmup technique of playing swift scales in octaves and tenths with his hands crossed, a trick that he says does wonders to develop the left hand. When a friend told him about big-handed Soviet Pianist Richter's trick of playing tenths and simultaneously playing thirds between thumb and forefinger, Van immediately duplicated it, commented, "Aw, that's not hard." He plays Rachmaninoff's Third Concerto with the cadenza that the pianist-composer rewrote for his own performances because it was too difficult...
...Riga and shyly presented a photo of himself, Van took it back to the hotel, felt so touched on looking at it again that he broke down and cried. After his final audition for the competition, he burst into tears when a friend repeated to him Soviet Pianist Richter's statement that "his playing excites and moves me as only very few of the greatest have been able to." Later, at a Richter recital, Van sobbed all through the first movement of the Schubert B Flat Sonata. Toward the end of his visit, he confided to a friend what...
...Richter, who knows Bach's entire keyboard works by memory, was at the harpsichord himself, his back to the audience, rising to conduct arias and choruses, then dropping like a falcon to improvise accompaniments for the recitatives. The critics were disarmed. Richter gave them a joyfully dynamic performance that was nonetheless satisfyingly authentic. Admitting that there were no signs of Richter's previous peccadillos in this concert and genially explaining the old flaws as "growing pains," the dean of Munich's critics, Karl Heinz Ruppel, summed up the concert in one word: "Wunderbar...