Word: pianist
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Surrounded by Russian souvenirs, including a 6-ft. lilac bush, mop-topped Pianist Van Cliburn, 23, fresh from victory in Moscow's International Tchaikovsky Competition, flew into New York to clasp his happy parents with bear hugs, gab about his Russian hosts ("They're very much like Texans"), shake hands with fans (among them, one seven-year-old who rapturously referred...
...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...
Extravert. When he graduated from high school in 1951, at 17, Van headed for Manhattan and a scholarship at Juilliard. 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...
...Juilliard friends recall him as an easygoing, extraverted Texan of undeniable instinctive talents, but limited intellectual interests. Says a fellow pianist: "He never even talked music or seemed to think about it much when he was away from the piano." Now and again he even let his practicing slide; his mother periodically called him from Kilgore to urge him to practice, or called Manager Arthur Judd of Columbia Artists Management to tell him to get after Van. For a while he was informally engaged to a tall, lissome brunette from back home named Donna Sanders, who was studying voice...
Most of the people close to him agree with Critic Abram Chasins that, because his basic instincts are "those of a pristine musician," Van will survive the perils of his success. But U.S. music is unlikely ever to be the same again. "What he has given to it," says Pianist Eugene Istomin, "is glamour. He has reminded everybody that we are no longer a cowboy country musically...