Beethoven Piano Sonatas – Sviatoslav Richter

There is something almost embarrassing about listening in on a genius arguing with himself, and this newly surfaced BBC tape of Sviatoslav Richter—recorded live at the Royal Festival Hall and never before given official release—puts us in exactly that uncomfortable, thrilling position. Richter, we are told, once looked back on a reading of the Appassionata and confessed to a nagging dissatisfaction he could not quite name. Everything went right. The house loved it. There was apparently a gentleman so overcome he sprang from his seat. And still Richter distrusted the results enough to hesitate over releasing them at all.

That anecdote could belong to any number of his concerts. But hearing this disc, I begin to think it belongs to this one.

The recital opens, unexpectedly, with the least imposing of the three sonatas on offer: the Piano Sonata No. 3 in C major, op. 2 No. 3, a work Beethoven wrote still very much under Haydn’s roof but already kicking at the walls. Richter’s account here is extraordinary, possibly among the finest he committed to any tape, studio or otherwise. The outer movements have a coiled, athletic energy, fingerwork of terrifying cleanliness, but never merely brilliant for its own sake. What strikes me most is the slow movement, which Richter shapes not as a galant interlude but as something closer to prophecy: hushed, inward, harmonically strange in ways that Beethoven himself may not have fully understood he was writing. Richter finds Opus 111 lurking inside Opus 2. That is not a small feat of interpretive imagination.

The Bagatelles, op. 126, come off with similar sureness. The first, in G major, unfolds with a kind of chaste, silvery clarity. Richter barely seems to touch the keys. The fourth, thrust up against it, detonates: stark octaves, sudden shifts of register, an almost bipolar violence that Beethoven surely intended as disorientation. And then the sixth, which Richter plays as a kind of reconciliation of the previous two temperaments: it opens in a blaze, all sparks and abrupt accents, before Richter dissolves the heat into a long, singing cantabile line, the fire banked but not extinguished. It’s canny programming, whether Richter’s own idea or the BBC engineers’ luck of the take, and it works.

Then comes the Hammerklavier, and here matters grow complicated, as they always do with this sonata, which has broken lesser and greater pianists alike since 1818, and continues to do so.

Richter had given his first public performance of the piece only the year before this recording, in Moscow, and there’s an occasional sense here of a pianist still discovering the outer boundaries of a structure he already commands technically but has not yet fully inhabited. The playing is dramatic, sometimes bordering on stark, with the huge fugal finale hurled off with a fearlessness that borders on the reckless. There are a few blurred entries, though nothing calamitous. The slow movement, that vast Adagio sostenuto that has reduced better critics than me to vague mysticism, is spacious without tipping into the inert. Richter resists the temptation, which claims so many, to make it merely exquisite. It is not beautiful. It is closer to grief.

And yet. I keep circling back to Richter’s own unease, quoted by Bruno Monsaingeon in the Notebooks and Conversations, about a performance that satisfied everyone but himself. He wondered, elsewhere, what Schnabel had found in an early Beethoven sonata that made it sound “as if for the first time,” that quality of freshly minted discovery, rather than well-rehearsed conviction. It’s possible that is exactly what nags at this Hammerklavier: the architecture is there, the drama is there, the fingers rarely fail him, but every so often you sense a performance being delivered rather than found. I don’t say this to diminish it. Even a slightly less-than-revelatory Richter Hammerklavier towers over most pianists’ best efforts. Solomon’s poise, Schnabel’s own scrambling humanity, Arrau’s granite weight, Pollini’s icy precision: Richter belongs in that company even on an off night, and this may not even qualify as an off night.

Sonically, listeners should be warned: the Royal Festival Hall of this era was a dry, unglamorous acoustic, and the transfer preserves its shortcomings honestly. There is some hiss, an occasional clangy edge in climaxes, particularly in the outer movements of the C major sonata and the fugue of the Hammerklavier. Keep a hand near the volume knob. This is not modern digital sound, and no amount of remastering will make 1975 Royal Festival Hall into 1980s Suntory Hall.

Collectors will recall the Bagatelles’ earlier appearance on a Rococo LP, and the Hammerklavier’s murky travels through labels of uncertain legitimacy: Musica Viva, Stradivarius, Amadeus, none of them exactly models of engineering rigor. This is, in effect, the first time any of us has heard this occasion properly, with real provenance behind it.

Should it have been released? Richter himself apparently wavered. I don’t. Imperfect, self-questioning, occasionally rough at the edges, this is still Richter at a level most pianists never reach on their best day, and the C major sonata alone justifies the disc’s existence. Recommended, with the caveats stated plainly above.