I know this is a ridiculous question, but I’d be curious on what the consensus is with this… if you could only pick ONE. I originally meant to leave it unbounded as long as the pianist left recordings, but noticing how space restricted the polls were I’m splitting it up in four - 78, LP, CD, FLAC/Mp3.
I’ve included 10 of the most lauded contenders above which can reasonably be said to belong to the LP era (as many as the poll allows), but there are numerous others of course. If your pick isn’t included -> comments.
Gilels is perfectly fine to vote for, it’s just to drop a comment instead of picking one of the above. I actually had him on here initially, but substituted him for AdL before pressing send since I wanted a bit more variety (and since I figured people who like EG would probably like SR even more).
It sucks I could only include ten. 20 and I think I would have hit the 95 percentile.
And unlike some people, I love absolutely everything he played - even Mozart, Haydn, Debussy, and Chopin. My least favourite Richter performance is still ahead of my favourite performances of most other pianists.
Yup. I couldn’t live without his best recs and I strongly suspect that if I was given a time machine to see one, and only one, pianist play, it would be him improvising.
Yeah, I won’t argue with you. I wouldn’t agree either, but he wasn’t like anyone else and left some remarkable things. I’ve noticed I like him more and more every year.
