Word: pianists
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Allegro. He is born on Musikalnyi Peruelok - Music Street - in Kiev. His uncle is a music critic, his mother a brilliant amateur pianist. At the age of ten he memorizes the piano scores of Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Parsifal. Clearly, little Vladimir is a musical prodigy...
...Moscow there are other forces, other plans. When the revolution comes, Papa's bank account, position, all go into the Red. The family must eat; Vladimir, the hothouse flower, protected and indulged during his first 17 years, blossoms into a full-time professional pianist at 18. Only 200 people -most of them admitted free - attend his first concert. At the second, there are more paying customers. The third is a sellout. The career and the reputation gather velocity but not money. Vladimir is paid with bread, sausages, clothing; he is, literally, the family breadwinner...
...tempo slowly, deliberately. Horowitz's fingers are like coiled springs of Russian steel; they tear with trip-hammer speed and force across the keys, and in the last movement he arrives at the end four measures ahead of the orchestra. The audience roars its affection for the impatient pianist; it is the beginning of a lifelong affair. Even the crusty Beecham cracks a smile. Paderewski calls Horowitz the best of the younger generation. Rachmaninoff and Ravel applaud...
Allegretto Con Amore. It is as if Liszt or Paganini had returned from the grave. Everyone in the hall's 2,760 seats rises and gives the 61-year-old pianist a standing ovation before he has played a note. He rushes to the piano and begins. The lean, intense face seems to exhale a melancholy all its own, but the fingers are as joyous as they were in the old days. The Chopin sings; the opaque, psychedelic visions of Scriabin are somehow made lucid. A critic calls him still a monarch. His wife is overjoyed...
Married. Maria Cooper, 28, willowy daughter of the late Gary Cooper; and Byron Janis, 38, Pittsburgh pianist lionized by the Russians during 1960 and 1962 tours; he for the second time; in Woodbridge, Conn...