''Selected for release on CD for their outstanding artistic and historical importance'' is DG's description of these analogue recordings of Richter issued between 1956 and 1962, by which latter year he was already 47 but still a comparative stranger in the West. Nothing gave me greater pleasure than renewing acquaintance with him, at 41, in the first three items. You need only hear the opening bars of ''Des Abends'', the first of the Op. 12 Fantasiestucke, to realize anew how very close to his heart Schumann has always been. Like ''Warum?'' from the same set, he plays it with an intimately tender, poetic fantasy all his own, never allowing sentiment to degenerate into sentimentality in his loving lingerings (even though he almost brings ''Warum?'' to a standstill en route, at 1'48''—1'56'' in track three). And what impulsive elation he finds for ''Aufschwung'', and exhilaration for ''Ende von Lied'' before laying bare Schumann's innermost heart in the laden coda of that final piece. I'm only sad that for unexplained reasons (as on the original LP which I still possess) he omits ''Grillen'' and ''Fabel'' (Nos. 4 and 6) from the set. Waldszenen, thankfully, he plays complete—again characterizing each piece, whether guilelessly rustic, haunted or hearty—with all the freshness and joy of new discovery. And how arrestingly he conveys the composer's heated protest in the second of the four 'Barricade' Marches growing from the Dresden uprisings of 1849.
Whereas those three mono recordings (made in Prague) are clearly and vibrantly reproduced on CD, I was a little less happy about the quality of sound in the F major Novellette and the Toccata, recorded in Warsaw in 1959. Compact Disc remastering cannot disguise the fact that the piano is surely too close, and that in the heightened excitement of both these more demonstrative works its tone grows clangy. Sometimes I even thought Richter himself was a little over-insistent in the course of the Toccata. But how beautifully he makes the instrument sing in the soaring song-melody episodes of the Novellette.
As for the concluding Abegg Variations, here he exults in all the romantic trouvailles (not forgetting the ad lib released-note spelling out of ABEGG near the end) as well as in the sheer exuberant brilliance of the 21-year old composer's Op. 1. This was recorded live during Richter's 1962 Italian tour—and persistent audience coughing suggests that it must have been an unusually chilly winter. What a pity we're not allowed a few seconds' applause from them at the end by way of compensation. The performance cries out for response.'