Legend from Moscow

Can he really be as good as .they say? The question last week prompted a capacity crowd to jam Helsinki's Conservatory of Music to hear a famed but little-recorded visiting pianist play for the first time outside Russia. The answer came quickly. Without even waiting for the welcoming applause to die away, Sviatoslav Richter launched into Beethoven's Sonata in D, and both audience and critics knew almost at once that they were listening to one of the world's great pianists at the top of his form.

The main program was devoted to four Beethoven sonatas, to which Richter added works by Schubert, Schumann and Chopin as encores. Swaying, gyrating, twisting his face into gargoyle grimaces, Richter at times lowered his jutting jaw until it almost touched the keys, at other times threw his head back in a kind of trancelike reverie. His bravura passages had a grandeur with no hint of pounding, his pianissimos a feather lightness, and his crescendos or decrescendos were so tightly controlled that they seemed to swell and diminish like the modulations of a well-trained voice.

Richter's Beethoven seemed to have a ' nervous, compulsive energy lacking in any other pianist. Wrote one critic: "It is strange that a Communist country should produce the most arrogantly individual instrumentalist of the era."

As for'Pianist Richter, he insisted that it had not been one of his best nights. At home, he is less known for his Beethoven than for his Liszt and Schubert. Unlike most Soviet artists, he is also an ardent champion of moderns. He generally insists on playing only one composer at each concert, explains: "Chopin after Beethoven is like watercolors after oil painting.'' At 46, Richter still gives some 120 concerts a season in Russia, labors at the keyboard for as long as ten hours at a stretch, and has been known to sit down for a three-hour practice session immediately after a concert.

In his Moscow apartment, where he does landscape paintings from memory, Richter listens by the hour to recordings of Rubinstein, Gieseking and Lipatti. During later tours--perhaps London or even the U.S. this fall--he is bound to show again that he belongs in that company.

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