One of the best classical music documentaries

This is an excellent, enlightening, and moving film about a great artist. Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in music.

The film takes the form of an extended interview with the elderly Richter interspersed with a generous amount of achive footage of him and some of the other great musicians he worked with during his long career, such as Rostropovich, Oistrakh, and Karajan. (There is a funny anecdote included about the time they recorded Beethoven's Triple Concerto that makes Karajan sound ridiculously vain.)

The sound on the earliest footage isn't that good, especially in the pieces from Soviet Russia, but things improve once the story reaches the 1960's, when he started giving concerts in the West.

There are two parts to the film: one on each side of the DVD. Despite what some of the other reviews say, there are English subtitiles. However, they are not on by default. You have to use the DVD's setup menu to turn them on.