M U SIC Running ON er TN our illusory 'threepence off' economy,
the 'only article that really gives better value than the customer bargained for is the old-fashioned piano recital. If the night goes reasonably well, there's always a string of 'encores' or, as the purists say, 'extras.' The audience stays on in a state of happy uncertainty, greediness sharpened by a touch of speculative, almost sporting interest. 'What'll he play next? The Campanella? The "Raindrop" Prelude? Gollywog's Cakewalk?' Sometimes they are given things they have never heard before. They sit there stumped, some of them too guilty about their ignorance to enjoy what's going on. All the way home in the tube they wonder aloud to each other. 'Sounded like Ravel to me.' Early Prokoviev, perhaps?' Likely and unlikely alternatives are chewed over. John Ireland, Cyril Scott, Satie come up.
Something of this kind went on after last week's momentous recital at the Royal Festival Hall by the Soviet virtuoso Sviatoslav Richter. He brought with him a three-piece programme--- Schubert's B major Sonata (No. 6), Cdsar Franck's Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, and the B minor Sonata of Liszt. This had a parsimonious look. Nobody was fooled, though. Three pieces became eight. Of his five encores, all unan- nounced, a Debussy triptych (General Levine, Per pas sue la neige and Serenade interrompue) eve the spotters little trouble. But what and who were the remaining two? The papers next morning offered no clue.
There is no thirst keener than musical curi- osity unallayed. People with tongues hanging out (myself included) telephoned the Festival Hall or Mr Richter's agent. Richter let _it be known that both pieces were Rachmaninov's. Many of us had surmised as much. To be precise, they were Nos. 1 and 2 from the second- set (Op. 39) of Etudes tableaux (1917). I was delighted to meet them.
For decades there was something of a down on Rachmaninov. I will not go so far as to say that Rachmaninov has been as much a smear name as Rachman tout court. What I will say is that some of his music (e.g., the Second Piano Concerto) has been a box-office winner. (all those choons, all that sumptuous melancholy!), and that, in austerer musical circles, success on such a scale is not readily forgiven. Another stumbling- block has been the fiction of pathological intro- spection and self-indulgent gloom as Rach- maninov's central traits—an idea dredged up from certain pages of biography rather than from the scores, some of which (the heady finales of the Third Symphony and the Fourth Piano Concerto, for instance) make gibberish of it.
His Op. 39 set comprises nine pieces. For days I have been spelling them out on my piano, as well as listening to three of them (Nos. 1, 2 and 5) as recorded for Decca by another Russian virtuoso with plenty of soul and lots of fingers, Vladimir Ashkenazy. Who will forget the con- trolled fever with which Richter hurled himself into the allegro agitato of No. 1; or the facility, bewildering to the amateur, with which, in the middle section, he, like Ashkenazy, pitted groups of seven semiquavers in the right hand against pairs of quavers in the left? (My hope is that both these artists will be nudged by their labels into recording No. 7 of the set, as good a late- Romantic funeral march as anything in Mahler, with interludes of monkish dirge tasting strongly of consecutive fourths.) Under Richter's hands, however, the bigger surprise was No. 2 (A minor). It starts off with slow left-hand triplets, a mood- setting device that goes back to Beethoven's `Moonlight.' But the first fopr notes of the Dies !rat., one of Rachmaninov's thematic totems, serve the triplets as a springboard. Harmonic bleaknesses ensue, as well as moments of relent- ing and melting, that never entered Beethoven's head.
How many hearing No. 2 for the first time guessed that it 'represents the Sea and Seagulls'? The phrase is from a letter by Rachmaninov to Respighi on learning that Respighi was at work on orchestral transcriptions of No. 2 and four other 'tableaux.' Rachmaninov suggested that his disclosure of this and other 'composer's secrets' would elucidate the character of the pieces 'and help you to find the necessary colour for their orchestrations.' Respighi's reply was courteous. but, on the point at issue, non-committal. I am not surprised. What a piece of music 'means' in an extra-musical way is anybody's fancy. One man', Sea , and Seagulls are another man's lovesic stroll through autumn woods. Probably Respighi had worked out his transcription timbres, derivin,4 them from the etude's strictly musical constitu- ents, long before Rachmaninov put his oar in.
Richter's recital was his first at the Festival Hall since his 1962 appearance, a mildly dis- appointing because obviously off-form occasion. All leeway is now made up-and .much more. I described the night as momentous: and so it was. I could myself have done without the over-
arpeggiated solemnities of the Cdsar Franck; and Schubert's B major, although played with shining lucidity, had me perversely hankering after the greater B flat major (No. 10), as always happens to me when any pianist plays anything else, especially a sonata, by Schubert. Taking the encores into account, however, the entire scheme was, fore and aft, a finely devised frame for the Liszt sonata, its centrepiece.
The crux here was not so much Richter's wealth of technical resource, a power-control that runs from electric hammer to thistledown, as his sense of what Liszt was about. The plunging energico tumults and the uphill assaults in double octaves were pure brimstone. Nor were the grandioso pages wanting in noble clangour. But consider the other extreme: especially the up- trail and repeated down-trail of scale passages, slow and pianissimo, in the F sharp section which precedes the fugue. As Richter played or (better) sighed them, these scales had an invalid languor. And the languor and the sickness were those of a soul newly delivered from hell. To the dynamic extremes of the Sonata, as to all its other conflicts, Richter brought a poetic and binding vision that came, I should say, from deep inside himself, as well as from deep inside Liszt. Pity we haven't a tape of the Sonata's first London performance. This was in a Georgian lodging-house immediately north of Regent's Park, the player Karl Klindworth, a friend of Richard Wagner (sole audience on this occasion), the year 1855. Wagner wrote to Liszt that the grand, sweet, noble, sublime B minor, 'beautiful beyond anything,' had filled him full and made him forget the misery that was London. He didn't overstate the case.
CHARLES REID
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