Word: horowitz
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...thin crust of official coolness often melted, however, notably at the conclusion of a Horowitz press conference at the Conservatory's Rachmaninoff Hall. There, hardened Soviet journalists shouldered one another aside in their frenzy to get autographs. "Sign en Russe," reminded Wanda, overseeing the impromptu session. And when Horowitz emerged from the conference, he was confronted by a horde of fresh-faced music students eager to get a glimpse of the master. "It is very important to us for him to have a big success," said one girl through her tears...
...secret of Horowitz's appeal is twofold. His phenomenal technique, regarded by piano connoisseurs as the most dazzling since Franz Liszt set the standard of virtuosity in the mid-19th century, gets the listeners into the tent. Horowitz could always do anything he wanted at the keyboard, whether pounding out octaves or rippling off scales in thirds. But mere technique is not enough. Just as Luciano Pavarotti's high notes, in the tenor's prime several years ago, were backed up by a gorgeous liquid tone and a supple sense of phrasing, so Horowitz's pianism offers many subtleties...
After he went to the West, Horowitz saw his father only once more, in Berlin in 1936. The visit proved to have fatal consequences. Returning home despite the pleas of his son, Samuel was arrested on suspicion of being a Nazi agent; his fluency in German and his trip to Berlin were used as evidence against him. He was exiled to Siberia, where he died...
...York City, 1928. Sir Thomas Beecham, the prickly British baronet and conductorial autodidact, was making his American debut in a concert with the New York Philharmonic. So was Horowitz. Beecham was apparently not about to let some upstart, unknown Russian steal his thunder, even if the piece was Tchaikovsky's thunderous Piano Concerto No. 1. Horowitz was unable to speak English, but it was clear from the rehearsals that even a translator would be no help. "Beecham thought I was of no importance," the pianist remembers. At the concert, the conductor adopted an even more ponderous tempo than during...
...went. From the opening bars of the finale, Horowitz raced ahead with all the mad passion of a cossack charge. "I played louder, faster and more notes than Tchaikovsky wrote," he later recalled. Beecham tried to rally, but there would be no catching up. "I was doing it my way. He was doing it his way," says Horowitz. "On the first night, Beecham came in second." The pianist finished several bars ahead of the orchestra. The audience erupted in a frenzy. In the New York Times, Music Critic Olin Downes captured the intensity of the moment. "A whirlwind of virtuoso...