Word: concertant
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...doing what comes naturally. He never played fewer than five encores; he sat down at a piano everywhere and at the slightest provocation any hour of the day or night. He insisted on playing the whole of his Leningrad program at a rehearsal several hours before the evening concert for the benefit of conservatory students unable to buy tickets. When he visited Tchaikovsky's grave in Leningrad, he delighted his guides by taking some Russian earth back with him, plans to use it to plant a Russian lilac cutting at Rachmaninoff's grave near Valhalla in New York...
Repeatedly, the Russians' adulation moved Van to unashamed weeping. After an eight-year-old boy came forward after a concert in Riga and shyly presented a photo of himself, Van took it back to the hotel, felt so touched on looking at it again that he broke down and cried. After his final audition for the competition, he burst into tears when a friend repeated to him Soviet Pianist Richter's statement that "his playing excites and moves me as only very few of the greatest have been able to." Later, at a Richter recital, Van sobbed...
...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 intervened and forbade her a concert career...
...Says one of his contemporaries: "He never had any trouble having a good time. He was a good dancer. He was one of the most congenial boys in school." But Van was also as much a maverick in smalltown Texas as he was later to seem on the international concert circuit. Childhood and adolescence, outside his family, he remembers as "a living hell." He had reached his full 6 ft. 4 in. (size 12 shoes) by the time he was 14, and he was excruciatingly selfconscious; he is still convinced that he has "no looks." More important...
Then Van fell prey to the rigors of the "concert jungle." The second season after the Leventritt Award he had only two-thirds as many concerts; the next season he played virtually none. There were some personal reasons. First he expected to be inducted into the Army. At the last moment an Army medic discovered that he had persistent nose bleeds and declared him 4-F. Then, last summer, his mother broke a vertebra, and he went back to Texas to coach her piano students for six weeks. By that time it was too late to think of bookings...