Word: richter
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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...
...Consider Richter: The Authorised Recordings, a 21-CD collection of previously unreleased performances now available from Philips Classics in limited 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...
...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...
...which may account for Richter's distinctive, Olympian style. His huge stevedore's hands address the keys with the utmost confidence, and though the wrong notes sometimes fall thick and fast, there is never any question of who is in command -- or what the point of the performance really is. Richter has never been a virtuoso on the order of Vladimir Horowitz or Lazar Berman, a later Soviet firebrand with a crackling technique and not much else. Instead, he is a musician first and a pianist second. Hearing him play, one has the sense that if he could, he would...
...graduating from Harvard Business School in 1981, she joined the Los Angeles Times, for which she covered everything from the oil industry to the Iran-contra affair to Bob Kerrey's 1992 campaign for the presidency. She interrupted her campaign stint to have Nicholas, now 2, with husband Paul Richter, a White House correspondent for the Los Angeles Times...