Chris Bruce mentioned the Horowitz arrangement of Pictures
at an Exhibition. I'd like to call his attention to
Sviatoslav Richter's live 1958 recording of the work, which
puts Horowitz in the shade. There's a description of it in
an obituary essay in the New Criterion.
[extract of
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/16/oct97/coleman.htm]
Thanks to “live” recording, we have evidence of Richter’s
concentration during the most trying of circumstances—almost
a laboratory demonstration of this capability within him, if
you will. It occurred at the infamous Richter recital given
in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1958, and now newly reissued on a
Philips CD. The program was par for the course, that is, for
Richter. He opened the program with the very daunting
Pictures at an Exhibition, of Modest Mussorgsky, in its
original version for piano. After the intermission, he
played works of Schubert, Chopin, and Liszt. What makes
these performances unusual is the physical condition of the
audience: Sofia was plagued by a flu epidemic, and the
coughing during the performance of Pictures is well nigh
unbearable. As the work progresses, one senses Richter
driving himself inward. The more they cough, it would seem,
the more demonic and unsettling the performance. This
recording, along with his hypnotic Schumann recital on
Deutsche Grammophon (above all the Forest Scenes and the
Fantasy Pieces), might be a good place to start a new
generation listening to Richter’s art. He was a great
pianist, of course, but he was also beyond category, or, as
Le Monde put it, “Richter was unique because he was a bit
crazy and a bit of an idealist.”
http://www.classicalnotes.net/classics/pix.html
And what about the piano version that started it all?
Although there had been others, it was a recording of an
extraordinary 1958 Sviatoslav Richter recital in Sofia,
Bulgaria (Philips 464 734) that refocused public attention
on the merit of the original. Intense, full of nuance,
supremely poised and Russian to the core, Richter's
masterful performance fully vindicated Mussorgsky's work as
a masterpiece in its own right, without need of translation,
embellishment or improvement.
------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
