Hearing Is Believing

Sviatoslov Richter is beset by a problem that many a pianist would welcome: his audiences refuse to let him go home. Having astounded Carnegie Hall with an all-Beethoven program in making his Manhattan debut (TIME, Oct. 31), Russia's great pianist returned last week to Carnegie to practice his extraordinary technique on works of other composers. The best way to dismiss his audiences, he discovered, was by quietly closing the keyboard of his concert grand.

Richter's Prokofiev was so strikingly different from that of other pianists that it seemed at first like the revelation of a new musical personality. A longtime friend of the Soviet composer, Richter managed to illuminate the lyric qualities usually obscured by the percussive Prokofiev style. Even in the most frenzied and violent passages--notably during Sonata No. 6, when he flailed the keyboard with a clenched fist--Richter drew forth a tone that was warm instead of strident, as full of shadings as a guttering candle flame. Later in the week Richter offered programs including Haydn, Schumann, Debussy and Rachmaninoff, playing each one with the uncanny air of direct communication that he conveys better than any other pianist alive. Under Richter's hands, even Debussy's much-abused Clair de Lune looked like a new moon. Wrote an all-but-wordless critic, the New York Herald Tribune's Jay Harrison: "Uncanny. It has to be heard to be believed."

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