The Lost Tapes, Beethoven sonatas 18,27, 28 & 31 album review – Richter always found something fresh to say
Though he claimed to dislike performing in a studio, Sviatoslav Richter became perhaps the most intensively recorded pianist of the 20th century. But while his studio work was extensive, it was the huge volume of recordings made officially and unofficially at his recitals across more than 40 years that really bulked out his discography, with multiple versions available of many of the core works in his repertory. For those reasons the rediscovery of 'Lost Tapes' might not initially seem so remarkable. The performances, of four Beethoven piano sonatas, Opp 31 no 3, 90, 101 and 110, are taken from recitals that Richter gave in 1965. Op 110 comes from a performance at the piano festival he had founded the previous year at La Grange de Meslay near Tours, the others are taken from a concert in Lucerne three months later.
There are recordings of Richter's performances of all four sonatas already in the catalogue, but the immediacy of these versions is startling. He was never content to keep on replicating the interpretation of a particular work; temperamentally, I suspect, he could not contemplate such lazy routine. Instead, each work was approached afresh each time he played it, always finding something new, whether it's the joy that courses through the third of the Op 31 set, the myriad colours and subtleties he brings to Op 101, or the serene, almost liturgical seriousness with which he presents the fugues in the finale of Op 110.
The original recordings were made by Deutsche Grammophon engineers, who were following Richter around Europe that year, and the sound has been refined for this release. What has proved more intractable has obviously been the piano tone itself, which, in the Lucerne performances especially, seems very bright and rather shallow, sometimes sounding almost like a mid 19th-century instrument. It does take a bit of the gloss off the performances, but the playing is still glorious.
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