Sviatoslav Richter. Legendary Concert in London

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Sviatoslav Richter. Legendary Concert in London 

Sviatoslav Richter (1915-1997) was, unquestionably, one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century.

A complicated and temperamental man, Richter strictly avoided being filmed. The circumstances of this Barbican recital were far from ideal: Richter, who was known to cancel concerts at a moment’s notice, was apparently unaware until shortly before the concert that it was to be filmed. After a considerable and heated discussion, he agreed to the filming on the condition that no camera would be in his field of vision. 

This challenge was overcome at the expense of the film crew, who were accustomed to expending thousands of watts of lighting power when televising such an event. Richter insisted on restricting the lighting to a single 40-watt bulb, focused not on him, but on his music. This eccentric lightening was unconventional even without cameras present, but it was his standard practice at concerts, as he wanted to focus maximum attention on the music and de-emphasize the importance of the performer. It also served to mask his use of a score, a practice he implemented in 1979 after a memory lapse at a concert.

When the great Sviatoslav Richter took the stage carrying his own music and accompanied by a page-turner at this recital at London's Barbican Centre in March 1989, he resembled a distracted John Malkovich -- balding, bespectacled, and bored looking -- so unsuspecting members of the audience might have been forgiven for thinking that they were in for a dull evening. 

But though he looked like an accountant performing by the light of a small lamp, Richter played like a god. 

Mozart 's Greatest Violin Piece

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,Violin Concerto No. 5 in A, 2nd Movement...
soft, tranquil, calm....

Mozart’s five authentic Violin Concertos were all products of a single year — 1775.
At nineteen he was already a veteran of five years experience as concertmaster, for which his duties included not only playing, but also composing, acting as co-conductor with the keyboard player (modern orchestral conducting was not
to originate for at least two more decades) and soloing in concertos.

It was for this last function that Mozart wrote these concertos. He was, of course, a quick study at everything that he did, and each of these works builds on the knowledge gained from its predecessors. It was with the last three (K. 216, 218, 219) that something more than simple experience emerged, however, because it was with these compositions that Mozart indisputably entered the era of his musical maturity.

These are his earliest pieces now regularly heard in the concert hall, and the last one, No. 5 in A major, is the greatest of the set. A. Hyatt King wrote that this is not only the best of Mozart’s concertos for violin, “but has no rival throughout the second half of the 18th century.”