Debut to Remember

To play his best, says Soviet Pianist Sviatoslav Richter, he has to feel in tune with the concert-hall decor: blues and greys put him in a communicative mood. Last week, in his long-awaited Manhattan debut, Richter tried out the new white and gold interior of Manhattan's Carnegie Hall. If his phenomenal performance was any guide, Carnegie had struck on the color combination of the decade.

Interior Logic. In keeping with his preference for playing only one composer at each concert, Richter offered a program of five Beethoven sonatas--Nos. 3, 9, 12, 22 and 23 ("Appassionata"). The hall, studded with conductors, composers and fellow pianists, was hushed to expectant silence from the moment Richter completed an awkwardly bobbing bow and turned to plunge into his first selection. Before he was halfway through, he seemed every bit as big as the legend that had preceded him. Sometimes bending jut-chinned over the keyboard, sometimes leaning backward with dark green eyes fixed on the ceiling, he displayed all the technical virtuosity expected of him: a sinewy and remarkably sensitive rhythm, ringing bravura power coupled with a feathery pianissimo touch, the ability to swell or diminish from one to the other with remarkable control.

Even more impressive was Richter's remarkable ability to sing his way into the emotional heart of the music. His Beethoven was rarely showy--he seemed at times to be deliberately dampening the music's more obvious appeals in order to insist on the kind of interior logic that only a scrupulously honest pianist can capture. When he finished, the audience gave a roar of applause. Richter returned to play four encores (by Schubert, Schumann, Chopin), but he would have preferred to end with Beethoven: "After the 'Appassionata' you should play nothing. What can you play after that?"

Obsessive Perfection. An obsessive perfectionist, Richter had originally planned to lock the doors of Carnegie at concert's end and play right on into the night, putting the Dvorak Piano Concerto into shape for its scheduled Philadelphia performance two days later. He reluctantly abandoned the idea only because his debut had taken so much out of him. On other occasions, however, he has found himself so dissatisfied with his performance that he has sat down after the audience has left and played the entire program over again. At 46, Richter is making his first extensive tour (ten weeks, coast to coast) beyond the Iron Curtain, although he played briefly in Finland last spring. He is accompanied by his wife, Singer Nina Dorlyak, who alone seems able to coax him out of the black moods of depression he occasionally suffers. In addition to making his Manhattan debut and playing with the Philadelphia Orchestra last week, Richter recorded the Brahms Concerto No. 2 with the Chicago Symphony. The musicians were aghast when he would come to the end of a movement that seemed letter-perfect and then hold up his hand to signify that he wanted to do it over again. Occasionally, he would look up to one of the boxes in Chicago's Orchestra Hall to get a nod of approval from his wife. He completed the 50-minute concerto after seven concentrated hours of recording and rerecording. Once during his Chicago appearances, Richter went back to his hotel to catch a nap. Because the bed was too soft, he slept on the floor.

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