'"Good – I'll play it three more times". The place was Paris, the Salle Wagram. The time was two o'clock in the morning, late February 1963. The speaker was Sviatoslav Richter, and 'it' was the opening Allegro, 188 strenuous bars long, of Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy.' So starts the original sleeve note on this LP, which is unusually an account of the recording sessions rather than a note on the music. Ironically Richter disliked recording in a studio and preferred an audience but nevertheless the performances captured here are, as Gramophone remarked, "really something very special." In the original November 1963 review in GRAMOPHONE, RF remarked of the Wanderer Fantasia: "Richter pounds away at the outer movements with just the steely brilliance they need. This is tremendously athletic playing, overpowering in effect..." and overall: "...this Richter performance is really something special, quite apart from the fact that he is more realistically recorded than Brendel..."