Word: liszt
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Vladimir Ashkenazy Plays Rachmaninoff, Liszt, Prokofiev (Angel). Russia's newest cultural export plays with ice-edged articulation and singing tone. The 21 -year-old pianist is at his best in Rachmaninoff's Variations on a Theme of Corelli, in which the keyboard sound swells and fades with the fitful ease of sunlight playing across water...
Richter is most at home with Liszt and Schubert, also plays Debussy and Ravel occasionally ("They're too beautiful to play very often"). Unlike most Soviet artists, he has a wide command of contemporary Western music, e.g., Bartok, Hindemith. All told, he has a repertory of between 25 and 30 complete recital programs, plus a slew of concertos...
...thunderous applause between movements. After both concertos, as he rushed to embrace Conductor Kondrashin, he won shouting, standing ovations-and a deep-throated roar when he finally sat down to his encores : Rachmaninoff's Etude Tableau, the finale of Samuel Barber's Sonata and the Schumann-Liszt Widmung. The critics chimed in with the crowd. Sample: the New York Times's Ross Parmenter called Cliburn "a major talent," found that he "lived up to expectations...
...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 intervened and forbade her a concert career...
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...