Garrick Ohlsson (from an interview, 2014)

 G a r r i c k  O h l s s o n

  When I was 17 I heard Sviatoslav Richter play the Scriabin Seventh Sonata at Carnegie Hall. And it was an incredible, unforgettable experience. I didn’t know what had happened to me; I had just never heard anything like that before. At that point I’d never looked at the piece — I barely even knew that all these Scriabin sonatas even existed. The language is so complex, virtually atonal, and at that point it was just impenetrable to me.

I recently had the most wonderful experience. I actually found an old bootleg recording [on YouTube] of that same Richter recital I’d heard when I was 17! And it was just incredible to hear it again, close to 50 years later, and it was still an incredibly great performance. Just to hear how marvelously and how precisely he played, and how freely, with such an understanding of the push and the pull and the hills and the valleys of an immensely complicated piece — all the layers and all the textures…

     It was, because as I said, at the time I knew it was amazing but I just had no idea what had happened. So to listen again, with the perspective of all these years, and knowing the piece so well now, and I thought: “Wow, yeah, this is still better than me. Yay, good for him!”