March Comes in Under The Sign of Richter

“All the music is inside his head shaped like Michelangelo’s dome. All that beautiful music nestles there like the Infant in the lap of Raphael’s Madonna,” Heinrich Neihauz, another prominent pianist and teacher of Sviatoslav Richter, spoke of his favorite pupil. These words best describe Richter’s sparkling talent and his cosmic world outlook. It is hard even to describe him as merely a musician. Rather, he was a philosopher, thinker, and teacher of life. What he did as he sat at the grand piano was like a study of the universe. Whoever partook of it, however fleetingly, seemed to begin a different way of reckoning time.

For the Ukrainian music lovers March is under Richter’s sign. Sviatoslav Richter was born March 20, 1915, in Zhytomyr and spent his childhood in Odesa. After moving to Moscow, the celebrated pianist did not forget his Ukrainian devotees; for forty years he gave concerts in Kharkiv, Donetsk, Lviv, Uzhhorod, Dnipropetrovsk, and elsewhere in Ukraine. Performances at the Lysenko Hall of Columns of the Kyiv Philharmonic Society marked special events in his career. On every such occasion a great many entrance tickets were sold. The audience was packed, forming several rows in the aisles, as all the chairs brought into the audience were not enough. Conservatory students would steal inside through windows several hours before the concert and hide in the harp cases, so that they could listen to his music from the wings. His every concert was a discovery.

People even enjoyed listening to him play the scales, marveling at the way his fingers flew over the keys. Prominent musicians say that Richter’s place in world music is still vacant. And there are his pupils and followers (he taught not by using technical exercises but by his personal example).

Two of his pupils will appear in a memorial concert at the Hall of Columns on March 18: Eliso Virsaladze, a woman pianist, winner of numerous contests who often took part in the December Soirees festival of music and art founded by Richter at the Pushkin Art Museum in Moscow, and Natalia Gutmann, laureate of the Triumph International Prize, another participant in the December Soirees who played in various instrumental groups together with Richter. The noted pianists will perform pieces for the piano and cello, including Beethoven’s 12 Variations on Godel’s Oratorio Judas Maccabeus along with Chopin and Rachmaninoff sonatas.