Word: virtuoso
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...parents, his teachers, his childhood friends, his musical associates. In Manhattan, Music Editor Richard Murphy and Researcher Rosemarie Tauris (whose husband is a conductor) interviewed musicians, managers, Juilliard teachers and friends. For Dick Murphy's story about the music sensation of the year, see Music, The All-American Virtuoso...
...mops up his one-Texan conquest of the Soviet Union this week, the Russians have to look back a century for a comparable triumph. That was when Franz Liszt, history's most vaunted piano virtuoso (and the teacher of the man who taught Van's first teacher-his mother), made his debut in St. Petersburg. Wearing Pope Pius IX's Order of the Golden Spur over his white cravat, his immaculate dress coat clanking with his other medals, his "shapely white hands" encased in doeskin gloves, he appeared, tossing his shoulder-length blond hair, before an audience...
Maverick. In the tradition-filigreed world of highbrow music, the Texas longhair is a maverick who conforms to nobody's image of a virtuoso. His family has been American on both sides for at least four generations. His pale baby face, with its cornflower-blue eyes beneath a tangle of yellow hair, might suggest a choir boy-which he has been. He is exuberantly gregarious, unsophisticated and, on the surface at least, totally untempera-mental. Former Cincinnati Symphony Conductor Thor Johnson recalls that once, in an orchestral tutti during the rehearsal of a concerto, Van rose from the keyboard...
...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 of Horowitz during his prime, and he has everything Horowitz always lacked." Raved Britain's Sir Arthur Bliss: "He plays with...
Slim, tweedy Composer Imbrie worked intermittently on his concerto for four years, completed it in 1954. As performed last week by the San Francisco Symphony, with Robert Gross as violin soloist, it proved to be a propulsive, clamorous virtuoso work in both twelve-tone and traditional diatonic idioms, with its limber solo line woven through the big sonorities of the orchestra in a stirringly unfolding tapestry of sound. The first movement, in alternating slow and fast tempi, built to its main climax by echoing the solo violin nights with orchestral figurations set at closer and closer intervals. By turns...