Sviatoslav Richter - The 100th Anniversary (5CD) (2015)

For the 100th anniversary of Sviatoslav Richter, Melodiya presents its arguably biggest project in its semi-centennial history: a 50-CD set of Sviatoslav Richter’s concert recordings! 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 the most erudite connoisseurs and collectors rejoice. Most of the featured recordings are broadcasts from concerts played in Moscow between 1962 to 1983. However, the exceptions are of special interest. These are: one of the first Sviatoslav Richter's extant concert programs – Schubert’s last sonata and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (1949); a recording of the concert with Nina Dorliak in Bucharest, in 1958; and recordings of “home” rehearsals with Nina Dorliak. It would be difficult to name all the names of the composers featured in this set. A great amount of 20th century music, both domestic and foreign, perhaps deserves special attention: Richter performs Myaskovsky’s piano sonata, Shostakovich’s violin sonata and selected preludes and fugues, as well as works by Hindemith, Bartók, Britten, Berg, Szymanowski, Ravel, and Debussy. There are numerous piano pieces by Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin and Prokofiev, a few works by Haydn, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and Scriabin, the first volume of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Among the rarely performed works, we should note Dvorák’s piano concerto and Franck’s chamber ensembles. 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), and each set is placed in an exclusive bag. The 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.