Astonishing ‘lost tapes' from a piano great

Spectator

16 hours ago

These days the heart sinks when Deutsche Grammophon announces its new releases. I still shudder at the memory of Lang Lang's 2024 French album, in which he drooled over Ravel's Pavane pour une infante défunte; when I reviewed it I suggested that if the poor girl wasn't dead when he started, then she certainly was by the time he'd finished. Now she's been killed again, this time by the guitarist Robin Scherpen, whose Ravel Reimagined offers us 'a peaceful and serene soundscape'. Then there's Rêverie from Nemo Filou, a trio whose cocktail-lounge noodling allows 'the listener to drift off into bliss', and Sleep Circle, a 're-recorded version of the 2012 project Sleep' by DG's in-house snoozemeister Max Richter.
But the funny thing is that over the past year I've spent more on DG products than I have for decades. Like its competitors, the company is frantically mining its back catalogue. That isn't exciting: I don't need fancy new packaging for CDs I bought in the 1990s. But there are also recordings remastered by Emil Berliner Studios, named after the man who founded Deutsche Grammophon in 1898 – and the results are stunning.
EBS revisits the peaks of DG's catalogue, going back to the master tapes to recover audio information that was lost because the original sound engineers didn't have the right technology to extract it, or messed things up at the mixing desk. Although many of these new remasterings have been issued as CDs, SACDs or downloads, the cream of the crop is available only as pure analogue vinyl. Trust me: you haven't really heard Karajan's Mahler Fifth until you've invested £80 in the 'Original Source' LPs and played them with the best stylus you can afford.
But now EBS has worked a digital miracle that you can hear on any streaming service. The Lost Tapes is an album of four Beethoven sonatas performed by Sviatoslav Richter in 1965, recorded for possible release but then mysteriously forgotten for nearly 60 years. They are taken from live concerts in France and Switzerland in which we hear the pianist at the top of his form in terrific sound – a frustratingly rare combination.
Richter felt suffocated by microphones and you can hear a lack of spontaneity in many of his studio recordings. In contrast, some of his supreme flights of imagination are found in live concerts captured by wretched equipment. For example, his legendary 1958 Sofia performance of Pictures at an Exhibition, praised by critics for its 'staggering breadth of colour' and 'frenzied grotesquerie', sounds muffled or strident, depending on how you twiddle the knobs.
In 1960 Richter made his American debut with six concerts in Carnegie Hall. Gripped by stage fright, under heavy KGB surveillance, he tore through Beethoven and Prokofiev sonatas, Schumann's Novelletten and Rachmaninov Preludes with a mixture of savagery and feathery delicacy. The end of Beethoven's Appassionata comes so close to breaking the sound barrier that you scarcely notice the finger-slips.
Alas, the microphone was in the hands of a clueless stagehand – and when Sony reissued the recordings on CD they drained the colour out of the abrasive but vivid LP originals. But I was lucky enough to stumble on a version beautifully renovated by an amateur from an internet forum, and that sent me down the rabbit hole of the vast Richter discography.
Thanks to years of obsessive-compulsive collecting, I can compare the four Lost Tapes Beethoven sonatas – opuses 31 no. 3, 90, 101 and 110 – with other Richter performances. The last of these, in A flat major, represents a unique milestone in the composer's journey; Antony Hopkins once suggested that the transformation of the fugue subject into ecstatic rhapsody is the moment when Beethoven – and music itself – finally severed the shackles of the classical style. A fanciful theory, perhaps, but that's how Richter plays it, the final bars exploding with joy.
Is it a finer performance than the one he recorded in Moscow in the same year? No – it's almost identical, and the same is true of Op. 101 in A major, which Richter described as 'horribly difficult… even riskier than the Hammerklavier'. To quote Jed Distler's liner notes on this previously lost tape, we hear a 'bracingly effortless traversal of the Finale', in which the pianist 'untangles the knotty counterpoint with insouciant ease'. Richter was on fire in 1965, and his achievement in Moscow is every bit as jaw-dropping. The difference is the sound; in all the sonatas the pounding of Richter's left hand jolts you out of your seat and his ability to sustain a whisper at lightning speed defies belief.
It's hard to think of other Richter recordings in which technique and sound quality are so gloriously matched. We're told that Emil Berliner Studios removed the tiniest pitch fluctuations and audience noises, something that wouldn't have been possible until recently and other technicians probably couldn't replicate. So, all things considered, perhaps we should be grateful that some idiot at Deutsche Grammophon left these tapes gathering dust until precisely the right moment.