Customer Reviews

Johannes Brahms: Piano Sonata No.1 and No.2

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This is a live concert recording Richter made in Italy in 1987, though Decca has edited out the applause so that the recording sounds almost studio-like in its crystalline clarity. Richter was already 72 when this recording was made, and has obviously lost none of his technical brilliance, while his interpretive skills - his ability to see the entire arching composition as an organic whole - are unrivalled. I'm not a huge fan of Brahms 2nd sonata, I think it is compositionally weak compared to the 1st and 3rd, but I have not heard a performance of Brahms 1st Sonata to come close to this. Schumann called these piano sonatas of Brahms "veiled symphonies"...very evident in the 3rd sonata, but also here in the 1st. If you love Richter, or the Brahms piano sonatas, this recording is, in my humble opinion, indispensable! Richter pulls sounds out of the piano I've never heard from anyone...while the compositions are orchestral, few pianists can produce the sonic richness and subtlety like Richter. Don't think twice...just buy it!

When assessing any performance by Richter it's a good idea to try, so far as the thing is possible, to forget who is playing. The man has been subjected to so much undiscriminating and copycat adulation that the things that make him genuinely special are easily obscured. In fact these two performances of the early Brahms sonatas are completely without idiosyncrasies. They are live performances, by a top-flight virtuoso and general legend then in his eighth decade, that seem to me to come close to the classic performances from Katchen, now I believe available only as part of his omnibus Brahms edition.

Richter's speeds, with one exception, are a little slower than Katchen's. However the real difference is that the feeling of youthfulness from Katchen is not to be heard from a man of 70-odd. Technically there is very little to choose. Richter doesn't quite equal Katchen in the trills and filigree right-hand work in the early part of the finale of the F# minor, but that is the only significant difference in the technical respect. In other respects where Richter differs from Katchen this is obviously by his choice. I'm inclined to go along with that choice in the first movement of the C major, the very first track on the disc. Here Richter's steadier tempo helps in keeping the outlines of the movement clear for a listener whose wits are not as quick as Katchen's are. Again, in the sets of variations that comprise the slow movements of both sonatas, many will doubtless prefer Richter's more introverted manner. For me, there's not much to choose between them in the op 1 set, but I miss from Richter the highlighted tonal contrasts that Katchen brings to the corresponding set in op 2.

As for the rest, it's basically Katchen all the way for me. Richter's accounts do not present any greatly different outlook on the two sonatas, and they are first-class in their own right. For me the overriding consideration is that these sonatas are the stupefyingly great works of a composer barely 20. His maturity, scholarship, technical command, self-assurance and sense of his own destiny at such an age are maybe without parallel or equal in all the 19th century. At the same time he was an exuberant youngster, and where Katchen, taken from us in his prime, scores for me is in his exuberant youthfulness. The matter defines itself most clearly in the scherzo and in the last movement of op 1, respectively `allegro molto' and `allegro con brio'. It's pretty obvious to me which performance more epitomises those instructions, top-class though both are.

One interesting thing I think I have discovered from the liner-note here is the origin of a recurrent theme in the writings of Richter's supporters' club. Richter is often said to possess and exhibit a capacity for exceptional `unity', or some equivalent expression, in his accounts. This will seem highly questionable to any listener for whom the sense of unity in a work of music is a matter for the composer in all ways that count, not for the interpreter. The concept seems to date back to Richter's understandably enthusiastic teacher Neuhaus. What I believe the expression meant from Neuhaus was that when Richter offered a novel interpretation he could sustain the novelty in a coherent way. What I believe the expression means from those who have subsequently recycled it is precisely nothing. There is any amount of true gold to be found in the work of this colossus of the 20th century piano, but we need to be prepared to think about it and exercise our critical faculties and not to find mares' nests and repeat meaningless formulae. Richter has left us very little Brahms, and I am only too grateful for what I have here. These are probably not pieces that give scope for the kind of insights that make Richter one of the ultimate greats, and if they don't give scope for that we should not pretend to be finding it. This is another major memorial to a unique artist, unique not least in his unpredictability. Where he has surprised me this time is in being so mainstream.

Richter, like Polonius, believed that "beautified is a vile phrase." Prettiness meant nothing to him, and his Brahms can be clattery, hectic, and hectoring. only to suddenly turn on a dime and become meltingly tender. His unpredictability went hand in had with his originality as an interpreter. He can annoy you by arrogantly rushing through a phrase, as if his unparalleled gifts made it insignificant to be merely accurate. These two Brahms sonatas date from May, 1986, when Richter was 71. RCA has another live recording of Sonata no. 1 from two years later, and it is somewhat less fiery than this account, although both feature fairly clangy, brittle piano sound, exacerbated by the pianist's frequent outbursts of impatient fortissimo.

Richter tended to lose his edge as he aged, yet these are readings of unbridled passion tempered with episodes of poetry that few rivals can match. Mr. Bryson, in his thoughtful review, prefers Julius Katchen, yet despite Katchen's bent for Brahms and his undeniable virtuosity, his readings lack the magical element of imagination that Richter brings (for that matter, I prefer the young Emanuel Ax to Katchen on almost all counts). Glancing at Richter's discography, one notes that he didn't seem to take up these two gigantic sonatas until 1986, and he never played -- or was caught by the microphone, at least -- Brahms's third sonata, which is the favorite of most other pianists. Richter was full of such anomalies, of course. In any event, I'm tempted to call this the greatest recording I've heard from the elder Richter; it's unmissable for any lover of Brahms's early, prodigious piano sonatas.

These are well-played performances that nonetheless are a little bland to my ears. Yes, bland. From *Richter.* It happens. No. 1 probably fares best, in my view. It's clean and bright and energetic. Richter could bang up a passionate storm in the Brahms 2nd sonata, as he does in a concert video made in Japan in 1984, but his go here isn't as successful. There's nothing "wrong" with either of these readings, other than they're too middle-of-the-road and safe. I found myself admiring the fact that there are virtually no finger slips and the sound is crystalline rather than living the music. The 2nd's second movement, for example, in the right hands, can have a probing mystery, like someone searching, searching, but never finding. The scherzo--with a huge tip of the hat to Beethoven--can be bumptious and even giddy. But the finale is what's chock full of elation and a certain playful quality, which brings the sonata to a very bizarre and what have been for the time puzzling ending. Here it just...ends. The architecture isn't laid out for display, the drama isn't squeezed. Richter sounds like an actor who knows all his lines and performs flawlessly, but his mind is on something else. I didn't sit up once and say, "Ah, that could only be RICHTER!"

My reference recording for these readings is Anatol Ugorski (DG)--super-concentrated, brilliant, tremendously-dynamic, and even clearer sonics. For those who may have heard him in other works and fear eccentric readings, he is actually fairly centrist here, but always thrilling. Unfortunately, not available in the US except as an import, but it's worth looking hard for, rather than settling on the disc above. I also like a pianist others here have mentioned for comparison, Katchen, who as they say takes an approach very similar to Richter, albeit with a bit more fire and spark. Either would be preferable to this reading.

P.S.: Despite what other reviewers here write, nowhere does it say on the CD that this is a live recording, and the total lack of audience noise--before recording companies mastered isolated such sounds from the stage with their miking and digital editing--suggests to me it is not.

This excellent recorded CD has a explicit Richter sound that matches very good with Brahms..
It sounds like Brahms wrote the sonatas with Richter in mind.

If you like Richter, if you like Brahms, you will love this CD..