Sviatoslav Richter

Sviatoslav Richter was born in Zhytomyr, Ukraine, in March 1915, the son of a pianist and composer who was executed by the Soviet authorities during the Great Terror in 1941. He was largely self-taught through his teens, worked as a coach at the Odessa Opera, and entered the Moscow Conservatory only in 1937 at twenty-two — studying with Heinrich Neuhaus, the teacher who shaped his entire approach. He made his Moscow Conservatory début in 1942 and won the All-Union Pianists Competition in 1945.

His career across the next fifty years made him one of the central pianists of the twentieth century. His repertoire was vast and unusually catholic — the central German Classical and Romantic literature (Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms), the Russian repertoire (Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Mussorgsky), Bach (the complete *Well-Tempered Clavier*, recorded in two cycles), Debussy and Ravel, Bartók, Berg, Webern, Hindemith, Stravinsky and the contemporary work he chose to take up. He was famously selective about repertoire and famously private about his career: he refused to programme works simply because they were standard, and his programming and touring decisions were entirely his own. He recorded extensively, including the substantial Praga and Philips live concert series, the Melodiya studio sessions, and the late Olympia documentary recordings. His public appearances in the West from 1960 onwards — including his sensational 1960 American tour — established him as the central Russian pianist of the post-war Cold War musical exchange.

Richter died in Moscow in August 1997. Music Preserved’s archive includes a range of his recital and concert work from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.