December Nights [Sviatoslav Richter, Anatoly Kamyshev] [Melodiya: MELCD 1002204]

Joyous music making. Richter here plays with close friends, including the great cellist Natalia Gutman, and the result is glorious. Often performances of romantic chamber music captured on disc are slightly dry; many takes produces note-perfection but eliminates the spontaneous flow of the music. In these live performances, the accuracy is fine, but what emerges is great warmth, passion and a quality that I can only describe as 'organic'. The musicians have a grasp of the overall shape of the work so that what emerges, even in so loose a work as the Chopin cello sonata, is truly classical: that is the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. This is great music making. The recording quality is rather close and not of the best, but that is my only criticism.

Superb music making. I can only echo what the previous reviewer said except that the recording is really not at all bad. So I give it 5 stars to redress the balance.This is probably the best performance on disc of Schumann's passionate and difficult first piano trio (played by Richter with the husband and wife team of Kagan and Gutman), and one of the few performances of the Chopin cello sonata (Richter and Gutman) that balances passion with structure, a hard work to sound convincing and balanced. The booklet says Richter had a cold when he played the Chopin Polonaise Fantasie and Ballade 4 and that he thought his performances only 'passable'. As usual he was his own worst critic and he plays superbly. Indeed, sometimes Richter thrived on adversity.