Sviatoslav Richter - The 100th Anniversary Edition (2015) [50CD Box Set]

The 100th Anniversary Edition

For the 100th anniversary of Sviatoslav Richter, Firma Melodiya presents its biggest project in its semi-centennial history. The name of Sviatoslav Richter is inscribed in gold in the history of music. He was not just “more than a pianist,” he was even more than a musician. An owner of composing, conducting, artistic, directing and acting gifts, a connoisseur of literature, arts and philosophy, with a will of iron he made all his gifts serve the art of pianism. An “artist of planetary scale,” as of the critics put it, Richter was like that in everything in his unbounded repertoire that he never stopped replenishing until his last years, in his priestly frenzy of hours-long rehearsals, in the geography and number of performances, over 3 500 concerts in 770 places of the world for 55 years of his musical career! (“He was somewhat fathomless, Richter,” said one of his famous colleagues). However, after he conquered the world (almost literally), he remained indifferent to ovation and eulogies of the press, painfully experienced each of the “defects” he noticed in his performance, and confessed before the journalist Bruno Monsaingeon: “I don’t like myself.”

Melodiya recently marked its 50th birthday and now makes a unique present for both sophisticated experts and a broad circle of music lovers a 50-CD set of Sviatoslav Richter’s concert recordings!
It has to be understood that this collection is far from the complete phonographic legacy of the great musician. Nevertheless, the set includes plenty of exclusive, previously unreleased recordings that will make the hearts of even most erudite connoisseurs and collectors rejoice.

Most of the featured recordings are broadcasts from the concerts played in Moscow in 1962 to 1983. However, the exceptions are of special interest. These are:
• one of the first Sviatoslav Richter’s extant concert programmes – Schubert’s last sonata and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (1949);
• recording of the concert with Nina Dorliak in Bucharest, in 1958;
• recordings of “home” rehearsals with Nina Dorliak.
The set includes recordings of many of Richter’s ensemble performances with the likes of David Oistrakh, Mstislav Rostropovich, Yuri Bashmet, Oleg Kagan, Natalia Gutman, the Borodin Quartet, the USSR Bolshoi Theatre String Quartet, the singer Nina Dorliak and others. The piano concertos played by Richter are conducted by some of the best Soviet conductors such as Kirill Kondrashin, Evgeny Svetlanov and Rudolf Barshai.

The set looks like a black box in the form of a piano with a reading stand made from lined cardboard, containing, apart from 50 CDs, a set of 5 exclusive postcards.

The set comes with a hardback booklet in four languages (Russian, English, French, and German), each set is placed in an exclusive bag. Booklet includes texts written by Dmitri Bashkirov and Vladimir Ashkenazy. The set is released in a limited run of one thousand copies and each box has an individual collection number acknowledged with a Certificate of Authenticity.

According to Andrei Krichevsky, director general of the company, Richter bequeathed most of these recordings to the record label. He added that the new box-set contained a small part of the master’s legacy. The record label’s team worked on the recordings for over six months.