Sviatoslav Richter ????????? ??????: 1915

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Sviatoslav Richter – Écrits, conversations – Actes Sud – 1998

“I don’t play for the audience, I play for myself, and if I derive any satisfaction from it, then the audience, too, is content.”
“Music must be given to those who love it. I want to give free concerts; that’s the answer.”
“How can I teach, when I am learning all the time?”
“Put a small piano in a truck and drive out on country roads; take time to discover new scenery; stop in a pretty place where there is a good church; unload the piano and tell the residents; give a concert; offer flowers to the people who have been so kind as to attend; leave again.”
“I don’t like myself.”

His Russian Site

Neuhaus: “His singular ability to grasp the whole and at the same time miss none of the smallest details of a composition suggests a comparison with an eagle who from his great height can see as far as the horizon and yet single out the tiniest detail of the landscape.”
Boulez: “His personality was greater than the possibilities offered to him by the piano, broader than the very concept of complete mastery of the instrument.
Shostakovich: “Richter is an extraordinary phenomenon. The enormity of his talent staggers and enraptures. All the phenomena of musical art are accessible to him.”
Horowitz: “Of the Russian pianists, I like only one, Richter.”
Marlene Dietrich: “One evening the audience sat around him on the stage. While he was playing a piece, a woman directly behind him collapsed and died on the spot. She was carried out of the hall. I was deeply impressed by this incident and thought to myself: “What an enviable fate, to die while Richter is playing! What a strong feeling for the music this woman must have had when she breathed out her life!” But Richter did not share this opinion, he was shaken”.
2 Sites:
English
&
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Extrait de/Extract from “Richter L’Insoumis/Richter The Rebel” par/by Bruno Monsaingeon