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The Study of Nina Lvovna Dorliak
«I first met Richter when he appeared
at the Conservatory... I was coming back
along Gorky Street, deep in thought,
when Sviatoslav Teofilovich suddenly
strode up to me:
‘Let’s do a concert together.’
‘You want to play in one half
and me to sing in the other?’
‘No, I want to accompany you.’»
Nina Dorliak
Nina Dorliak’s study has become a kind of small
«museum» in the Memorial Apartment. A fine
chamber singer and teacher, she came from a fam.
ily with a singing pedigree that, according to the
family legend, goes back to Pauline Viardot herself.
On the wall is a photograph of her mother, Ksenia
Nikolayevna Dorliak, the famous Russian singer who
performed leading operatic roles on the stages of
Russia and Europe, and her brother Dmitri Dorliak,
an actor at the Vakhtangov Theatre in the 1930s who
died young.
They met in 1943, the «gracefully graphic» Nina
Dorliak and the young Sviatoslav Richter «with his
red, red hair, very thin and terribly impetuous», is
how she remembers him.
In March 1945, just before the end of the war, they
performed together for the first time at a Sergei Prokofiev evening in the Small Hall of the Conservatory. This appearance was a major event in the Moscow
music world. The pure, effortless soprano merged with
the magical notes of the music. Many music-lovers
still remember romances by Glinka, Schumann and
Rachmaninov and Mussorgsky songs performed by
the charming couple. They made a most harmonic
pair both on and off the stage. In the fifty years or so
that they lived together, they always used the polite
form «Âû» when addressing each other.
Nina Lvovna stopped singing rather early to
devote herself to the family and her teaching at the Conservatory. Richter’s tireless, titanic work, the future of her beloved pupils, and the nephew whom
she brought up after her brother’s death, all made
demands on her. She also had to protect Richter
from the excessive attention of his numerous
admirers. She was a sincere and loyal friend to him
and also a judge, who expressed her opinion tactfully and impartially. During the constant home
rehearsals, after the energetic commands to his
musical partner to «change pianos» and the endless repetitions and run.throughs, Richter would
say, «And now let’s listen to Nina.» It was Nina
who prepared the sandwiches and tea. Sviatoslav
Teofilovich would whisper to her, «We’ll have a
buffet in the interval, so lay everything out on the
oval table.» And if the phone suddenly rang, it was
Nina who hurried to pick up the receiver, because
Richter hated the telephone, and his request to
«Put another two cushions over the phone, please»
did not come as a surprise to anyone. The only
exception he made was when Nina rang him during
his tours.
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