Re: Pay attention

[Andrew Pask <andrew@kaleidacousticon.com>]

on 6/11/02 3:28 PM, Rainer Straschill at rs@moinlabs.de or somebody wrote:

> When I went to a solo concert by the late Sjatoslav Richter (classical
> pianist, with great understanding of Bach, Beethoven, Liszt and Chopin, 
>to
> name a few) who did in fact play with the lights off. This was one guy 
>who
> didn't give a damn for "tradition".


Oh man that guy was a MONSTER. I grew up with his Brahms 2  I think it was
with the Chicago Symphony. There is a documentary floating around about the
Russian pianists that he's on, basically the gist of it was you've got all
these Russian pianists this century you know guys like Rachmaninov and
Horowitz but Sviatoslav Richter just blew them all out of the pool. He was
like steel, really well wrought.

I think most of the solo classical piano gigs I've been to they've had the
lights off. I think a lot of the time with classical music people actually
have no idea what the tradition really is, like the whole tradition of
improvisation, or even vibrato, but they'll use the "tradition" button just
to try and get their own weird way.


L8r

A