Saturday, August 19, 2006

Russian Giants

THE ART OF PIANO 10 Emil Gilels & Sviatoslav Richter
This is wonderful and crazy, Gilels playing in front of soldiers in 1943, very surreal. Best I ever heard from him. Also, playing Tschaikovsky with sweat running down its cheek is priceless (and so is the music).

Extra points for hair and lip movement:
Gilels plays Rachmaninoff Prelude Op. 23 No. 5

Richter - Brahms 2nd concerto
Sviatoslav Richter plays Ravel
Ravel - Jeux d'eau
Ravel's Jeux D'eau played by Martha Argerich - just for comparison
Brahms - Intermezzo in E minor
Schumann Toccata
The date of the performance is December 12, 1985. This was actually Richter's first public performance of the Toccata in roughly 25 years.
Funny, someone took Richter's glasses off during the performance:).

Oistrakh plays Sonata 4 - Brahms - great duo (Menuhin/Gould and Fournier/Gulda are other great combinations)

From Russia's Great Modern Pianists by Mark Zilberquit:
I am an omnivorous creature and I want a lot of things. It is not because I am ambitious or try to do a great many things simultaneously. I simply love very many things and the desire to bring to the listeners all that I love never leaves me.
Gavrilov on Richter:
Richter is capable of learning one bar for an hour, or two, or three hours; more than once I witnessed him while practicing playing one page at least seventy times. Sitting in the next room listening to him, I was literally losing my senses. But he himself, whose patience in this sense has no limits, repeated the same passage again and again . . .

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