MUSIC: Art & Media: The Reluctant Virtuoso

The year was 1958, and the man of the hour was a rangy young pianist from Texas named Van Cliburn. As the winner of the first Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, Cliburn was front-page news, the cultural vanquisher of the Red Menace; in New York City he was given a ticker-tape parade. At the age of 23, Cliburn found himself the most famous pianist since Paderewski, his very name synonymous with piano playing. His future as a major figure in American music seemed secure.

It didn’t turn out that way. Cliburn was condemned by an adoring public to repeat again and again the concerto for which he won his prize, Tchaikovsky’s First, and he never fully developed into a mature concert artist. In 1978, overwhelmed by expectations, crippled by stage fright and exhausted by his celebrity, he stopped performing and holed up in the Fort Worth, Texas, home he still shares with his mother and first teacher, Rildia Bee Cliburn, now 97. He re-emerged in 1987 for a few tantalizing concerto performances. Now, at 60, Cliburn has embarked on his first national tour in 16 years with a program featuring two piano concertos, Tchaikovsky’s First and Rachmaninoff’s Third, as well as an orchestral performance of Copland’s Lincoln Portrait with himself as narrator. He is accompanied by the Moscow Philharmonic.

Meet the new Van, same as the old Van: at the intermission of the tour’s first concert, held at the Hollywood Bowl, the nearly neurasthenic Cliburn experienced what he called “light-headedness,” and the program was delayed while a doctor took his blood pressure. Eventually he returned to the stage, sheepishly informing the audience of 14,000 that he felt unable to play the Rachmaninoff concerto, and so substituted a series of solo encores, including a Szymanowski etude, Liszt’s arrangement of Schumann’s song Widmung, Debussy’s La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune and the Chopin C-sharp minor Scherzo. And then he was gone.

“My life was never geared to the concert stage,” said Cliburn in an interview before the tour began. “My life was always bigger than the stage.” He would rather attend the opera, he said, than play the piano in public, and in conversation he preferred repeating his mother’s homey aphorisms (“Choose carefully which works to learn, and never let them go; they will always be your friends”) to debating the merits of competing pianists. Even though he was going back on tour, Cliburn seemed if anything less interested in the life of a traveling virtuoso than he had in years past. That is partly owing to his nerves. “I have the same feeling today as the first time I played in public,” he said.

The effects of those nerves were on display at the Hollywood Bowl. The concert began promisingly enough, with Cliburn firmly projecting Honest Abe’s noble sentiments in a Texas twang. And once he wrapped his huge hands around the thundering opening chords of the Tchaikovsky, it appeared that Cliburn really was back. The formidable technique was still there, and the distinctive ringing tone. Cliburn really is a throwback to the piano’s Golden Age of blazing virtuosity and emotional extravagance. He remains one of the handful of players — and just about the only American — who can conjure up the world of Josef Lhevinne, Rachmaninoff and Horowitz.

The performance, however, suffered from an obvious lack of rehearsal, with the pianist and the conductor, Vassily Sinaisky, unable to agree on basic matters of tempo: Cliburn finished the first movement a good half-beat ahead of the band. The andantino movement went well enough, but disaster struck in the blazing finale, which fell apart in a tug-of-war — Cliburn pulling ahead, Sinaisky dragging back. The battle increased in intensity until, all at once, Cliburn suddenly appeared to lose interest, and the piece almost collapsed near the end in a welter of notes.

No Cliburn watcher, therefore, could really have been surprised when the pianist failed to answer the bell for Round 2. The Rachmaninoff, which he says is his favorite concerto, is even more difficult than the Tchaikovsky. Cliburn calls it “a one-act opera in which the soloist sings all the roles.”

So is Cliburn Comeback ’94 an incipient disaster? Far from it. The pianist’s spokesman says the tour will continue, with the Rachmaninoff. And however well or poorly he plays, Cliburn will afford new audiences a chance to hear what pianism in the grand manner is all about. The nuggets in the Tchaikovsky may have been few, but they were choice, and who among his contemporaries can match him in majesty, despite his limited range? Cliburn will never be the pianist we all thought he should be. But that is our problem, not his.