Word: cliburn
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Dates: during 1958-1958
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Idol. Certainly, Van never felt entirely at home in the small, dusty East Texas town nestled in a forest of oil derricks where he grew up. He was born Harvey Lavan Cliburn Jr., in Shreveport, La., an only child, in the eleventh year of his parents' marriage. His father is a minor oil-company executive with a modest income, his mother a talented piano teacher who studied in New York with Liszt's longtime pupil, Arthur Friedheim. She was on the verge of making her debut under her maiden name, Rildia Bee O'Bryan, when her mother...
...debut with the Houston Symphony as a winner of a statewide young pianists' competition, played Tchaikovsky's B Flat Concerto. The same year he played in Carnegie Hall as the Texas winner of the National Music Festival's nationwide competition to uncover talented junior soloists. Mamma Cliburn ferried him out to California to play for Jose Iturbi, and Iturbi promptly proclaimed him "the most talented youngster I've heard...
...mother thought he should be exposed to other teachers, but Van stubbornly refused. When he was 14, Mrs. Cliburn was taking master's classes at Juilliard, and Olga Samaroff,* a famed teacher at the school, offered Van a scholarship. But Pianist Samaroff died before he could start, and he refused to study with anybody else. In one volcanic scene with his mother, he threatened to give up the piano entirely if he was forced to go through with the Juilliard plans ("I always threatened her with that whenever she tried to give me away to another teacher"). They moved...
...Russian-born Pianist and Juilliard Teacher Rosina Lhevinne answered a knock at her studio door one day to find it filled with Van's rawboned frame. "Honey," he announced, "Ah'm goin' to study with you." It was the first time she had heard the name Cliburn, but she invited him in and asked him to play. Says Mrs. Lhevinne: "Right then I said. 'This is an unbelievable talent.' His mother had taught him very well indeed." She took him as a pupil, and he took the Juilliard's "diploma," or conservatory course...
...Break. Cliburn's big break came when he won the Leventritt Award. "We were sitting there," recalls one Leventritt judge, "when in walks this tall, mad-looking fellow, sits down and plays-of all things-Liszt's Twelfth Rhapsody. He bowled us right over. Ordinarily, the judges would not even seriously consider anyone who played a spectacular piece like that. But it was obvious that this was an enormous raw talent; they don't come any bigger." His playing of a far more demanding repertory clinched his victory. When it was announced, he grabbed the daughter...