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

f r o m__Russia _______w i t h__.( f o r b i d d e n )__.l o v e   SEVERAL NEW COLLECTIONS CELEBRATE THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE LATE RUSSIAN PIANIST SVIATOSLAV RICHTER. ___- - - - - - - - - - - - - BY BENJAMIN IVRY | Hardly a month went by last year without another major release of recordings by the Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter, who died in 1997 at age 82. He was recently honored as part of Philips' "Great Pianists of the 20th Century" series, as well as by new releases of several live recordings, including "Richter in Leipzig, the November 28, 1963 recital" (Music and Arts/Koch), "Richter in Helsinki 25 August 1976" (Music and Arts) and his "Last Concert," of three Mozart concertos from Japan, accompanied by the Japan Shinsei Orchestra led by Rudolf Barshai (Laurel Records). Although his recordings are now more widely available than ever before, "Slava" Richter himself still seems a mysterious, ambiguous figure of modern music. The hidden aspects of his personality and the reason why he remained a remote figure in modern musical history became clear only after his death, when friends came forward to state what had been whispered for so long: Richter suffered untold miseries in his private life and public career because he was gay, at a time when the Soviet regime considered homosexuality a punishable crime. Noted piano teacher Paul Moor, who had known Richter for decades, wrote a memorial article for Piano & Keyboard magazine last year in which he recalled the pianist's battles with depression. In 1958, at the time of Richter's first trips to the West, he told Moor that he sometimes went months without touching a piano, but could not explain why. Moor writes: "The life which Soviet law, almost as draconian as in Nazi Germany, forced him to lead resulted in Stygian cyclic depressions that literally crippled him, pushing him perilously in the direction of suicide. The Soviet musical world regarded Slava's homosexuality as common knowledge, and had no problems with it. But those laws deprived him, all his life, of really fulfilled personal happiness." Instead of living permanently with a male lover, Richter spent most of his adult life with soprano Nina Dorliak, who was an understanding mother figure as well as a steady friend to him. Dorliak, his elder by some 10 years, provided the stabilizing force and social front that Richter needed. When he began to travel abroad in the late 1950s, he did form romantic attachments, but even these had to be kept secret, as the freedom to travel -- even for a virtuoso such as himself -- depended on the approval of Soviet authorities. Despite the obvious political pressures, Richter did protest in his own way, refusing to perform in Moscow in the late '50s. N E X T__P A G E .|. Self-exile in Siberia PHOTO BY AP/WIDE WORLD