Word: rachmaninoff
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...hero's welcome back to the U.S. with a ticker-tape parade up Broadway. He will go to Washington to be received by the President of the U.S. His first post-Russia concert (in which he will repeat his Moscow prizewinning pieces: Tchaikovsky's Concerto No. 1, Rachmaninoff's Concerto No. 3) has swamped Carnegie Hall with the heaviest demand for tickets in all its glittering history...
...when he sits down to play. Pianist Sviatoslav Richter, whom the Russians regard as their best, dubbed Van "a genius -a word I do not use lightly about performers." In tears of emotion Pianist Emil Gilels grabbed Van as he came off the stage after playing Rachmaninoff's Third Concerto, bussed him soundly on both cheeks. To Composer Aram Khachaturian, Van was "better than Rachmaninoff; you find a virtuoso like this only once or twice in a century." France's Marquis de Gontaut-Biron, a frequent judge of piano contests, found that Van had "almost the technique...
...trick that he says does wonders to develop the left hand. When a friend told him about big-handed Soviet Pianist Richter's trick of playing tenths and simultaneously playing thirds between thumb and forefinger, Van immediately duplicated it, commented, "Aw, that's not hard." He plays Rachmaninoff's Third Concerto with the cadenza that the pianist-composer rewrote for his own performances because it was too difficult...
...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's Westchester County...
...hours-a-day practice. During this period he may have sharpened some of the qualities that confounded Moscow critics: emotional nuances and inflections such as are normally heard only from string players; the special ghostly sonority that he can draw from the piano, as in the first movement of Rachmaninoff's Concerto No. 3; fast passages that combine a feathery sound with perfect, unblurred articulation...