Featured titles
-
By Richter's Side. Dialogues with Sviatoslav Richter by Yuri Borisov (2003, 2011)
Rights sold: France – ACTES SUD, Japan – ONGAKU NO TOMO, Russia – RUTENA, AZBOOKA, Spain – ACANTILADO
Richter shared with his younger friend the stories of his childhood, and recollections of his meetings with other celebrities (Britten, Fischer-Dieskau, Gavrilov, Michelangeli, Picasso, Prokofiev, Serkin, Sofronitski, Vedernikov, Yudina, etc.). He explained his vision of music, comparing it with other arts: painting (Ernst, Renoir, Schiele, Vermeer, etc..), literature (Balzac, Block, Maeterlinck, Mann, Ostrovsky, Proust, Racine, Rostand, etc..), cinema (Alexandrov, Chaplin, Cocteau, Kurosawa, Pasolini, etc..). Notes taken during or after these extremely interesting conversations Borisov has later converted into a book, thanks to which we can look into the inner world of Sviatoslav Richter, one of the most exciting figures on 20th century musical horizon.
ABOUT SVIATOSLAV RICHTER (1915-1997)
- The Italian critic Piero Rattalino has asserted that the only pianists comparable to Richter in the history of piano performance were Franz Liszt and Ferruccio Busoni.
- Glenn Gould called Richter one of "the most powerful musical communicators of our time".
- Van Cliburn attended a Richter recital in 1958 in the Soviet Union. He reportedly cried during the recital and, upon returning to the United States, described Richter's playing as "the most powerful piano playing I have ever heard".
- Arthur Rubinstein described his first exposure to Richter as follows: "It really wasn't anything out of the ordinary. Then at some point I noticed my eyes growing moist: tears began rolling down my cheeks."
- Heinrich Neuhaus described Richter as follows: "His singular ability to grasp the whole and at the same time miss none of the smallest details of a composition suggests a comparison with an eagle who from his great height can see as far as the horizon and yet single out the tiniest detail of the landscape."
- Dmitri Shostakovich wrote of Richter: "Richter is an extraordinary phenomenon. The enormity of his talent staggers and enraptures. All the phenomena of musical art are accessible to him."
- Vladimir Horowitz said: "Of the Russian pianists, I like only one, Richter"
- Pierre Boulez wrote of Richter: "His personality was greater than the possibilities offered to him by the piano, broader than the very concept of complete mastery of the instrument."
- Gramophone critic Bryce Morrison described Richter as follows: "Idiosyncratic, plain-speaking, heroic, reserved, lyrical, virtuosic and perhaps above all, profoundly enigmatic, Sviatoslav Richter remains one of the greatest recreative artists of all time."
Read more... -
Soviet Education, a novel by Olga Medvedkova
Rights sold: France - Alain Baudry & Cie Editeur, Spain - Acantilado
Prix Révélation de la Société des gens de lettres (2014, France)
Summer 1980: Moscow prepares for the Olympics at great risk, in the midst of the war in Afghanistan. The city is closed to non-residents, who in any case are abandoning it. Liza is one of them. An adolescent in search of her
identity, she has gone with her mother to a village she has never been to, but where her mother is very well known. And for good reason: the village bears her name. The mansion, an imposing but dilapidated Italianate building,
belonged to her ancestors, Russian princes close to the tsar. As for Liza, she bears the name of her father: Klein. A father who lives in America and the mere mention of whom is all but forbidden. Liza understands only that she has
a German name, and that she is the descendant, on her father’s side, of Joseph Klein, the Russian translator of Goethe.Here, suddenly, are too many identities, whose accumulating questions go unanswered. Jewish, aristocratic, Soviet, intellectual – her family is a tissue of contradictions. To crown it all, she is troubled by David, her mother’s friend,
whose house they are living in, and who as she quickly realizes is of Jewish origin, a pillager of memories in the ancestral mansion, an accomplice of the village folk, a disillusioned artist declared a “social parasite” by the
authorities, who collaborates with a film crew that finances its perfectly official films by trafficking in icons...Medvedkova's novel ideally combines a number of themes and elements which are quite typical for any novel where action is set in Russia, but their mixture produces an unexpected effect. Its protagonist a 15-year-old anorexic girl, a wonder-kid passing throughout a difficult stage of growing up and maturing, confronting the outside world and - especially - her authoritarian mother who herself has many skeletons in her closet.
The novel features the "ordinary family of Soviet intellectuals". Its narrative gains momentum gradually, and that subtly reflects the state of the soul and consciousness of the main character, its internal development: from slow and sleepy, to feverishly sharp, dizzy fast. Up to the very end of the book, Lisa (and the reader) doesn't see the full picture.
The novel is beautifully written, very dynamic and elegant. It's a concentrate of all Russian and Soviet just in the form that Western readership is interested to get. Aristocratic roots of Liza's family, dissidents, Soviet cultural elite, intelligentsia, etc. - in fact, the book provides a descriptive account of formation, way of thinking and self-perception of the modern Russian intellectuals, all these people who now got to play an important role in world science, culture,
politics, and economy.The book is originally written in French and has around 220 pages.
Read more...