Word: pianistics
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...Moscow, Brelis discovered the genesis of Horowitz's remarkably wide intellectual interests. Visiting the Scriabin Museum, the master pianist recalled that his parents had been advised by Scriabin to make sure that their son "knows art and literature, history and philosophy. To be a great artist he must know more than music." Then he said to Brelis, "Without a broad knowledge, I should never have known the clear thoughts and feelings I experience playing the piano...
Fortunately, the armed guards were music lovers. At once, they recognized the sensational 21-year-old pianist from Kiev who had had audiences from Moscow to Leningrad on their feet, cheering his pyrotechnical feats of pianistic derring-do. They gave only a perfunctory glance to his papers; instead, they crowded around him, rifles held casually, and pounded him on the back. "Now you go play for the rich over there and fill your pockets with money," one of them said. "But come back and play for us when your pockets are full. Do not forget the motherland...
...music lovers, Horowitz's tour featured just two formal concerts, in Moscow a week ago and in Leningrad Sunday, before continuing to Hamburg, Berlin and London. The first recital provoked an unprecedented near riot. As the security gates in front of the Moscow Conservatory swung open to admit the pianist's chauffeured Chaika, hundreds of young people burst through the police lines and stormed the Conservatory's Great Hall. Plainclothes and uniformed guards managed to grab a few of them, sending several sprawling. But many, perhaps most, raced past astonished ticket takers and ran upstairs to the balcony, where they...
...Horowitz, though, the concerts are only the most visible, public part of an extraordinary journey of rediscovery and remembrance. It began two weeks ago, as the pianist and his wife Wanda Toscanini Horowitz, 78, stepped off Japan Air Lines Flight 440 from Paris. Before leaving New York City, the pianist had been sanguine about his chances of success, both as a musician and as a cultural ambassador. "I am not a Communist, but I can understand their way of thinking better than most Americans," he declared. "We all know there is good and evil everywhere. I was brought...
...Moscow concert, there was no mention of the Horowitz visit in either Pravda or Izvestiya, only a brief announcement in the newspaper Sovietskaya Kultura. Soviet musical commissars explained the lack of coverage by observing the concert was already sold out. "We think of him as an American pianist," said Tikhon Khrennikov, the all-powerful first secretary of the Soviet composers' union, who nevertheless went to the concert. In response to the American attack on Libya, the Soviets boycotted a dinner in Horowitz's honor at the Italian embassy, but a postconcert party at Spaso House, the ornate Moscow residence...