Van Cliburn

Van Cliburn's extraordinary rise to fame in the late fifties was in no small part due to his performance of the Tchaikovsky concerto featured on this disc. This Regis release is a valuable document of the birth of a pianistic legend. The Schumann coupling shows a more introspective side to his musicianship.

history but in the entire history of performance. In that year the USSR established the first International Tchaikovsky Competition as a showcase for its own imperial talent. Once again the USSR would demonstrate that in the sphere of great romantic piano playing (one extending from Anton Rubinstein to Richter and Gilels) they had no equals. Summoning the finest pianists and jurors they prepared for a foregone victory followed by international acclaim. But neither they nor anyone else could have expected the gauntlet thrown down by a twenty-four-year-old 6’ 4’’ blond Texan pianist called Van Cliburn. Viewed with suspicion, Cliburn’s nationality invited hostility. This was the time of the cold war and the very real possiblity of a nuclear Armageddon as the USSR and America viewed each other across a seemingly unbridgeable chasm. Pre-conceived notions of American, Juilliard-trained pianists were in the air, of a crew-cut school expressed in broken-glass sound. So that Cliburn’s performances, characterised by broad tempi, rare poetic rhapsody and freedom captured in massive and delicate tone, came like a bolt out of the blue. All possible animosity turned to awe and amazement as Cliburn’s outsize audience listened to a pianist ‘more Russian than the Russians’, one who played their own music with a rare emotional warmth and charisma. Suddenly Cliburn, an outsider from alien territory, became their beloved ‘Vanushka’, the stage and dressing-room littered with gifts and flowers. Cliburn arrived in Moscow with three suitcases and left with seventeen. Later, when both jury and audience had recovered, their comments came thick and fast and this Testament release will surely re-ignite not a controversy but a unique triumph and occasion. Sviatoslav Richter, happily oblivious to competition protocol, gave Cliburn a hundred marks, his competitors zero, remarking, ‘he is a pianist, the others are not’. Shostakovich joined in the chorus of praise and Irina Zaritskaya (herself a major prize-winner, taking second place to Maurizio Pollini in the 1960 Chopin Competition in Warsaw) spoke with a special eloquence of Cliburn’s unique quality. “For we Russians his way with Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov in particular was uncanny. Such grandeur, romantic warmth and empathy. He came close to sentimentality, but he never quite crossed the line. His playing had an extraordinary nobility. You can’t even imagine the furore he caused and his playing is still endlessly discussed in Russia today.” Extract from the note © Bryce Morrison, 2008

Van Cliburn’s one and only appearance at the Salzburg Festival was a huge success with the audience. The present live recording underlines not only the young pianist’s technical brilliance but also the originality of his interpretations in repetoire that is not limited to a particular musical epoch. Van Cliburn never returned to the Salzburg Festival, even though Die Presse asserted that “he has every right to be regarded as a star and is a dazzling pianist in every sense of that term. His concert is well-suited to any festival of international standing…including the Salzburg Festival.”

The origins of these live 1960 performances lie inevitably in Van Cliburn’s legendary triumph in Moscow’s inaugural Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition in 1958, a time when competitions still mattered. Relatively few in number, one event did not dilute the impact of another. Yet if in those early days of, say, major competitions in Warsaw and Brussells winners were catapulted to international stardom, the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition was altogether exceptional. Created to display the superiority of Russian talent it was won by an American pianist whose massive technique, warmth, lustrous tone (“not kalaidoscopically varied, but invariably round, burnished and unforced”) made any alternative vote an impossibility. Jury (including Shostakovich, Kabalevsky, Richter and Gilels) and audience united in celebration of a pianist “more Russian than the Russians” and never more so that in his performances of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov. As the late Irina Zaritskaya, in the audience at the time and herself a major prize-winner put it, “for us Russians his way with what we considered our music was uncanny. Such grandeur, romantic warmth and empathy. He came close to sentimentality but never quite crossed the line. His playing had an extraordinary nobility and you can’t even imagine the furore he caused. His playing is still endlessly discussed in Russia.” Outsize acclaim followed and Cliburn returned to America to be fêted in a style unknown since the days of Liszt and Paderewski. Such celebrity, such sudden fame and fortune, has its dangers. To relish such lavish acknowledgement is understandable, but so is the need to grow and enrich even the most remarkable talent. Cliburn’s repertoire of largely standard works failed to expand and within too short a time the strains of endless touring, of prolonged stays in foreign and alien surroundings, to say nothing of sniping comments by colleagues envious of his fame, took their toll. Tired and disillusioned, missing his family and friends, Cliburn took a sabbatical that extended for many years. Judgements such as “I consider him to have been ethically defective as an artist. He never took it seriously that he had a pair of miraculous hands. I think that when his instincts could take him no further, he didn’t make the effort to buttress instinct with conscious understanding” must have hurt an essentially innocent nature. Later cocooned in Fort Worth, Texas, he remained unknowable (“he walks, stands with a sheath of reserve so thick you could cut it with a Bowie knife”) and certainly my own conversations with Cliburn many years ago in both Dallas and London rarely penetrated beyond a persona at once natural and calculated. Warm, charming, outwardly easy-going and with a wacky Texan sense of humour he made for delightful company, but I came away puzzled by a man who stayed so resolutely on the surface of things (“Oh, I’m so personal that I would never let anybody know what I like or dislike”). Did he end like Eileen Joyce, a similary ill-fated over-exposed pianist, whose early brilliance and glamour ended with the bleak opinion, “I’ve had an odd life. I haven’t liked it much.”?

Extract from the boklet note  Bryce Morrison, 2011