Word: russian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...love affair between Van and the Russians started sizzling when he appeared in the preliminary auditions-and never let up. Wooed by official Russia and by musicians, he was also pursued by adoring teenagers. Total strangers, men and women, hugged and kissed him in the street, flooded him with gifts, fan mail, flowers (one bouquet came from Mrs. Nikita Khrushchev). Women cried openly at his concerts; in Leningrad, where fans queued up for three days and nights to buy tickets, one fell out of her seat in a faint. When Moscow TV scheduled only the first half...
...himself when he thinks he is not ("Did you ever hear such lousy piano playing in your whole life?"). He can be equally hard on other players; e.g., he scorns Sergei Prokofiev's old recording of his own Third Concerto: "Sorry, but it's just not Russian...
...night. He insisted on playing the whole of his Leningrad program at a 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...
Repeatedly, the Russians' adulation moved Van to unashamed weeping. After an eight-year-old boy came forward after a concert in Riga and shyly presented a photo of himself, Van took it back to the hotel, felt so touched on looking at it again that he broke down and cried. After his final audition for the competition, he burst into tears when a friend repeated to him Soviet Pianist Richter's statement that "his playing excites and moves me as only very few of the greatest have been able to." Later, at a Richter recital, Van sobbed...
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...