Live in East Germany Vol. 1

Sviatoslav Richter was always a man apart: self-taught in Odessa, an excellent accompanist for the Odessa Opera and ballet companies, and, by 1937, at 22, playing before Heinrich Neuhaus at the Moscow Conservatory. Neuhaus is said to have whispered: “In my opinion, he is a musical genius.”

Richter remained a completely free, almost enigmatic figure. As Bruno Monsaingeon writes in Richter, The Enigma: “He fears nothing and offers no hold... he plays where and when he pleases.” Disciplined to the point of obsession, Richter said: “I am a mirror... He must not dominate the music but dissolve into it.”

The Lost Recordings presents two previously unreleased concerts, discovered in the archives of East German radio. Recorded in the mid-1960s, they capture Richter at his peak in music by Sergei Rachmaninoff and Franz Schubert. Neuhaus wrote that his gift was like an eagle seeing “as far as the horizon down to the smallest detail of the landscape.”