"Such is our reverence for Mr. Richter's distinguished career that we tend to overlook its ambivalence. He has indeed risen above his Soviet milieu, but he is also anchored to it. A part of him realizes that the instrument is just that: a device used to make something else, namely music. The other part of him surrenders to the primary tenet of the Soviet school: that the instrument dictates the style of performance, and that when music and that style clash, music must adjust. Mr. Richter is an honest man. He reads scores with sober, selfless care. Listen to him play Scriabin etudes, and you will hear a compelling need to tell complex musical stories with absolute clarity. Mr. Richter's uprightness extends to phrasing. No one has better calculated the needed breathing space between musical sentences. He teaches by example. On the opening page of Schumann's "Des Abends," Mr. Richter's withholding of the accented tone ideally describes the clash of moving melody note against a settled harmony beneath. It is a textbook lesson in rubato, sternly delivered. He has the moral courage to sustain the slowest of tempos in the first movement of the Chopin F minor Concerto. The slow movement peels away accumulated sentiment and admires Chopin's marvelous long breaths of movement. When it is time to laugh and be merry -- say, in Schumann's skipping, skittering "Traumes Wirren" -- merriment is not left to chance. If Mr. Richter has ever played a casual passage on the piano, I am unaware of it. Authority rises around his performances like great stone monuments. Mr. Richter does not interpret a piece of music; he looms over it."