Music: Family Affair

Rarely had the men of the NBC Symphony seen their little Maestro in such high humor and fine fettle. Pink-cheeked and glowing after his vacation in Italy, the terrible-tempered 81-year-old had kind words or a joke for everyone at rehearsal. The Maestro had his one inevitable flare-up of the day, this time over the absence without leave of a couple of trumpeters. The guest pianist watched the little tantrum, then, turning towards his wife and friends in the studio, wigwagged his eyebrows and giggled. For the soloist was a man who calls Toscanini “Maestro” to his face, but “Papa” when he’s not around.

It had been three years since Pianist Vladimir Horowitz had played in public with father-in-law Arturo Toscanini. But they had played the work together before, and recorded it together—Brahms’s mighty Piano Concerto No. 2. This time, at the end of the rehearsal, the Maestro had only one suggestion for “Volodya”: Toscanini trotted to the piano, plunked out a passage while Soloist Horowitz, standing by and towering over him, listened carefully and respectfully. They agreed to leave out one retard.

Last week, the mob of music fans who stormed into Radio City’s modernistic Studio 8-H for the opening concert of Toscanini’s eleventh NBC season, heard a concert to be remembered. As usual, shy, nervous Pianist Horowitz almost had to be propelled onstage. But, once there, the power and diamond-hard brilliance of his playing had the studio audience bravoing between movements, despite NBC’s standing request to the audience not to applaud until the work is finished. When it was finally over, little, white-topped Papa and slender, dark-haired Volodya stood together, bowing solemnly, as the audience cheered and clapped. .

A Race. Most listeners had lately found a new maturity and depth—if not yet real warmth—in the playing of Vladimir Horowitz, the sallow, thin-faced Russian who first astounded the U.S. 20 years ago with his mastery of piano technique.

When he arrived from Russia, he was out to burn up the U.S. with his razzle-dazzle speed. In his debut with the New York Philharmonic, he raced through the Tchaikovsky B flat minor concerto so fast that gouty Sir Thomas Beecham would not even try to keep up with him. By 1935, in the heyday of his elegant pink period (when he indulged in pink striped shirts and red ties), Horowitz was playing more than 70 concerts a year, and grossing about $300,000. Then he folded, up, with appendicitis complicated by phlebitis.

A Rest. Now 44, Pianist Horowitz has slowed to a more becoming pace. He has forsaken Beverly Hills for a quiet apartment and studio in Manhattan’s upper East side (and has become a U.S. citizen). Gone are the days of which he complains, “I played certain works so often that I couldn’t hear them any more.” He still commands the biggest box office of any living concert musician, but is sticking to his resolve to perform only six months of the year and not more than twice a week.

The other six months, he studies (he now refuses to play a work until he has studied everything the composer wrote), collects paintings and snuffboxes, plays poker and gin rummy for high stakes (but reduces the payoff to pennies), and relaxes with his family: wife Wanda and daughter Sonya, 14, who is still the apple of her grandpa Toscanini’s eye, even though she has lately given up the piano for painting.