Music: Hearing Is Believing

Sviatoslov Richter is beset by a problem that many a pianist would welcome: his audiences refuse to let him go home. Having astounded Carnegie Hall with an all-Beethoven program in making his Manhattan debut (TIME, Oct. 31), Russia's great pianist returned last week to Carnegie to practice his extraordinary technique on works of other composers. The best way to dismiss his audiences, he discovered, was by quietly closing the keyboard of his concert grand.

Richter's Prokofiev was so strikingly different from that of other pianists that it seemed at first like the revelation of a new musical personality. A longtime friend of...

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