A L S O_.T O D A Y Blue Glow The Keith Olbermann Story, Chapter Three: Our hero is rescued from Beltway babble by Murdoch's Fox Sports Y E S T E R D A Y "The Hi-Lo Country" By Charles Taylor Director Stephen Frears' laconic throwback to '70s westerns (01/04/98) R E C E N T_. M U S I C Critical Mass Twenty Salon critics pick the year's best albums (12/24/98) A master at dangerous play By Gary Kamiya With his last masterpiece, "Bitches Brew," Miles Davis changed jazz history -- again (12/16/98) Thinking inside the box By Eric Alterman The year's best in box sets provides obsessed fans of country, jazz, blues and rock with some treasures and some trash (12/16/98) What's so funny about peace, love and understanding? By Gina Arnold The worlds of pop and pomp collide at the Nobel Peace Prize concert in Oslo (12/15/98) Sharps & Flats Reviews of new CDs by the Royal Philharmonic, Afghan Whigs and Geoff Muldaur, and of a live performance by Billy Bragg (12/09/98) BROWSE THE MUSIC ARCHIVES COLUMNS FEATURES REVIEWS INTERVIEWS

FROM RUSSIA, WITH (FORBIDDEN) LOVE | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - In 1986, Richter toured throughout Russia for more than six months, playing in remote provincial towns of Siberia, some of which had not seen a pianist for generations. One wonders just how much of this obsessive performing in interior regions was motivated by Richter's permanent sense of personal exile in his own homeland. Desperately clinging to a land that officially rejected his emotional and sexual identity was his personal alternative to the choice of exile made by other Russian gay artists like Rudolf Nureyev. Not long after the Russian tour, Richter had a total physical breakdown, necessitating a quadruple bypass that permanently weakened him. More understanding of Richter's emotional dilemma may be gained by referring to certain recently released archival performances, like his 1953 reading of the Tchaikovsky Concerto accompanied by the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra led by Karel Ancerl (Supraphon/Qualiton). This somber reading is one of many Tchaikovsky concertos recorded by Richter that leave the listener with the odd feeling that he never quite identified with the music of the most famously gay Russian composer. By contrast, Richter's frequent musical collaborations with Benjamin Britten suggested an element of complicity, and a recent CD reissue of Britten and Richter at Aldeburgh, England, playing a program of Schubert's "Grand Duo" and Mozart's "Sonata K.521 for Four Hands" (on Music and Arts 721, distributed by Koch) reveals something of this shared emotional discourse. Competing massive CD sets from BMG/Melodiya and Philips also spotlight the pianist's great achievements. BMG/Melodiya's massive CD set of Richter's greatest achievements includes his performance of the usually derided Saint-Saens concerto No. 5, accompanied by the Moscow Youth Orchestra led by Kiril Kondrashin. Whereas the 19th century gay Frenchman's works are too often presented as kitsch and camp, Richter's reading is sober, serious and human, inarguably real music performed with sobriety and a direct approach -- by refusing to trivialize Saint-Saens, the pianist also refused to trivialize himself. Likewise, Richter's identification with the song settings by Hugo Wolf to poems by Eduard Morike, a 19th century gay German pastor, may also be linked to his own emotional conflicts. (Richter accompanied baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in 1973 concerts, released on DG, and a fuller program of other Morike/Wolf songs from the same year is on Music and Arts.) Richter will likely remain for all time one of the definitive performers of Prokofiev (as on DG 15119, where he unforgettably plays Prokofiev's Fifth Concerto) and Schumann (on DG 47440, he likewise plays the Schumann Concerto). A multitude of other composers, from Grieg (a riveting concerto on EMI 67197) to Debussy (on Orfeo d'or 491 981), not to mention Beethoven and Scriabin, immediately leap to mind whenever Richter's name is mentioned. To these previously known solid contributions may now be added the knowledge that his achievement came in the face of severe homophobia in Soviet Russia. Some of the great recordings made by one of the century's mightiest musicians could not help but reflect that experience. SALON | Jan. 5, 1998 Benjamin Ivry is a biographer of Poulenc (Phaidon) and Rimbaud (Absolute Press/Stewart Tabori and Chang) and the author of a poetry collection, "Paradise for the Portuguese Queen" (Orchises Press). His new biography of Ravel is due out next year.