Word: cliburn
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...year was 1958, and the man of the hour was a rangy young pianist from Texas named Van Cliburn. As the winner of the first Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, Cliburn was front-page news, the cultural vanquisher of the Red Menace; in New York City he was given a ticker-tape parade. At the age of 23, Cliburn found himself the most famous pianist since Paderewski, his very name synonymous with piano playing. His future as a major figure in American music seemed secure...
...didn't turn out that way. Cliburn was condemned by an adoring public to repeat again and again the concerto for which he won his prize, Tchaikovsky's First, and he never fully developed into a mature concert artist. In 1978, overwhelmed by expectations, crippled by stage fright and exhausted by his celebrity, he stopped performing and holed up in the Fort Worth, Texas, home he still shares with his mother and first teacher, Rildia Bee Cliburn, now 97. He re-emerged in 1987 for a few tantalizing concerto performances. Now, at 60, Cliburn has embarked on his first national...
Meet the new Van, same as the old Van: at the intermission of the tour's first concert, held at the Hollywood Bowl, the nearly neurasthenic Cliburn experienced what he called "light-headedness," and the program was delayed while a doctor took his blood pressure. Eventually he returned to the stage, sheepishly informing the audience of 14,000 that he felt unable to play the Rachmaninoff concerto, and so substituted a series of solo encores, including a Szymanowski etude, Liszt's arrangement of Schumann's song Widmung, Debussy's La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune and the Chopin...
...remains America's best-known -- and, in the record stores, best-selling -- classical pianist, and yet Van Cliburn hasn't taken his show on the road in 16 years. Last week, however, Cliburn, 59, announced a tour of up to 20 U.S. cities beginning in Chicago in June...
...stopping in 1974, when his father died, and then his manager, Sol Hurok. "I adored both of them," he says. "It was really quite a blow." And the virtuoso circuit was exhausting. "The life of a musician is the most solitary life. Sometimes I did find it very difficult." Cliburn never made any sharp break, just gradually stopped accepting new engagements, spent more time visiting friends (he lives with his mother, Rildia Bee, now 92), composing piano pieces, buying English antiques, presiding over the quadrennial piano competition that bears his name, working out, enjoying himself. "I am the furthest thing...