In the late afternoon of February 7th, 1989, we had to take an important decision in order not to lose an appointment which announced itself as unmissable. A recital by Sviatoslav Richter was advertised. It was to focus on twentieth century works, and to be held not in a comfortable Milanese concert hall, but rather at the Teatro alle Vigne, a deconsecrated former church in Lodi. This was a typical choice for the last stage of the great pianist’s career. He favoured unusual places, different from normal theatres and concert halls. He played with a score, lighted by a weak lateral lamp, not only due to evident problems of memory, but also, in that case, with the purpose of almost subverting a typical habit of concert life.
We had not taken into account a terrible fog. We soon realised that the only way to reach the small town, at the heart of the Po valley, would be to jump on a train – moreover, on a local train, the kind that stops at all stations. The train filled with potential audience and critics. This situation used to be relatively common once, and it allowed to chat at leisure about music and related events with knowledgeable people.
We arrived at the station with a biting freeze. We managed, I don’t know how, to reach the church, whose inside seemed bare and entirely uninviting. The concert began. Suddenly we forgot the difficulties of the short journey (even though all were worried about getting back to Milan), and it was as if we had been immediately sent into another universe. Richter’s authoritativeness was well known. His performing way brought you to another world, and, in that case, given the specific programme of the soiree, the listening process announced itself as particularly challenging. So challenging it did be (I had brought a few scores in order to follow the items I didn’t know well), that at the end I still remember getting a tensive headache, which, though, was not particularly unpleasant. It was rather the result of a state of total concentration, following the exceptionality of this event and the complexity of the performed works. Most importantly, it was the result of a superhuman effort, in order to try and follow the thread of the discourse imposed by the performer.
Listening back, today, to the recording of that evening, in a certain sense I relive the concentration of that moment, followed by the enthusiasm for the exceptional performance of Szymanowski’s Second Sonata, recorded five years earlier at the Festival di Brescia e Bergamo. This was an extraordinary example of music revealed in its fullest dialectics by a master of interpretation.
The five bars indicated as “Impetuoso passionate” which precede the exposition of the fugue subject (“Allegro moderato”) in the last movement, with the almost impossible “precipitando” sequence of chords, remain as an example of an absolute pianistic challenge, solved by Richter with extreme bravura and with a unique sense of expressive urgency.
Luca Chierici © 2022
Translation: Chiara Bertoglio
Sviatoslav Richter: The Lodi Concert (1989) (Historical Piano Recordings)
