His life's work
Pianist Van Cliburn returns to Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 yet again, this time with the Florida Orchestra.
By JOHN FLEMING
Published September 24, 2006
Van Cliburn and Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 go back a long way.
"When I made my debut with the Houston Symphony when I was 12, I played the Tchaikovsky, and when I made my New York Philharmonic debut, it was the Tchaikovsky," Cliburn said in a recent phone interview. "I always smile to myself when I think how that piece has sort of been with me all my life."
It was the Tchaikovsky, of course, that Cliburn played in 1958 to win the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. At 23, the tall, lanky Texan became an instant icon, an American hero through his triumph at the peak of the Cold War, six months after the Soviet Union's launch of the first Sputnik satellite. The pianist came home from the competition to a ticker-tape parade in New York and a meeting with Dwight D. Eisenhower at the White House. He remains America's most famous, beloved classical musician, both for his career and the international piano competition that bears his name.
Now Cliburn will play the concerto again in a concert Monday night with the Florida Orchestra at Mahaffey Theater. The engagement was originally scheduled for last spring to mark the orchestra's return to the St. Petersburg hall after a nearly yearlong renovation, but delays in the reopening of the venue pushed the concert back. Monday's performance will be the first of the orchestra's 2006-07 season.
Cliburn, 72, played as many as 100 concerts a year in the 1960s and '70s, but he makes just a handful of appearances these days. "I don't give as many concerts as I have in the past, maybe 12, 15, 20 a season, something like that," he said, speaking from his home in Fort Worth, Texas. "I get some lovely invitations. I'm grateful to be wanted."
In the past year or so, Cliburn has played with major orchestras, including the Chicago Symphony, the Boston Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra, all at their summer festivals, as well as with the Seattle Symphony in its 2005 opening night gala. He also has played with regional ensembles such as the Virginia Symphony and the Corpus Christi, Texas, Symphony.
"He plays for friends of his. He doesn't have to do it. He picks and chooses, a few times a year," said Leonard Stone, executive director of the Florida Orchestra. "He's the biggest artist this orchestra has had in terms of name recognition."
Stone was managing the Syracuse, N.Y., Symphony when he first engaged Cliburn in 1968.
"He was still Numero Uno in everybody's mind, and he was the most expensive artist I had ever engaged up to that time, for $10,000, which then was a lot of money," he said, adding that Cliburn's fee for Monday's concert is confidential.
Stone, who has presented Cliburn a half-dozen times with various orchestras, got to know the pianist well when he was manager of the Dallas Symphony in the 1980s. During much of that period, Cliburn was taking a self-imposed break from performing that stretched to nine years.
One of his first returns to the concert stage came in 1989, when he played for the opening of the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas. "I still remember going to Van's home and talking with him from 5 in the evening until 4 a.m. about coming out of retirement and opening up the Meyerson with us," he said.
"It was tremendously exciting. Thousand dollar top tickets, a packed house, critics from all over the world. He walked out on stage and people just went wild, you know, son of Texas returns."
Stone visited Cliburn a number of times at home in Fort Worth, where the pianist enjoys entertaining and practicing late at night. "There were pianos in so many rooms," Stone said. "Even when I visited him one April the Christmas trees were still up and still decorated, because he said he loved them so much."
Cliburn's Tudor-style mansion is stuffed with antiques and Steinway pianos, though "not as many pianos as there used to be," the pianist said, with a laugh. "I have seven or eight now, including Mother's two pianos."
Rildia Bee O'Bryan Cliburn was her son's first piano teacher, and a profound influence on his career. She had studied at the Juilliard School with Arthur Friedheim, a one-time pupil of Franz Liszt, and that connection to the romantic tradition remains a touchstone for Cliburn, who was born in Shreveport, La., and raised in Kilgore, Texas. When talking about his fondness for the Piano Concerto No. 2 of American composer Edward McDowell, for example, he mentioned that Liszt played the work in manuscript.
Since his long sabbatical, which Cliburn called his "intermission," the pianist has mainly performed the Tchaikovsky First Concerto, though he has also been doing the Grieg Piano Concerto, a less challenging work in terms of technique. The reviews have sometimes been scathing - his reading of the Grieg was "ponderous and portentous," wrote Chicago Tribune music critic John von Rhein in 2005 - but audiences don't seem to mind.
"I think they see the icon, the Cold War victor," said Stone, who hasn't heard Cliburn play since that 1989 Dallas performance.
Inevitably, audiences break into applause after the fiery ending of the first movement of the Tchaikovsky. "At a concert or recital I play, you can clap any time you want to, it doesn't bother me," Cliburn said. "When they clap at the end of the first movement, that gives me inspiration. In Seattle, they gave us a standing ovation at the end of the first movement. Why, I had renewed confidence for the rest of the piece."
Cliburn's 1958 RCA recording of the Tchaikovsky concerto was the first classical LP to go platinum. It has sold more than 3-million copies and still stands as a definitive rendition of the warhorse.
"I was driving over to Dallas the other day, and our classical music station had it on, and I thought, well, it still holds up," Cliburn said. "There are many ways to say the same thing, but I was extremely pleased with it."
Cliburn can be an elusive interview subject - several times, appointments were scheduled and then postponed ("Mr. Cliburn is an impromptu sort of person," his representative said) - but when the pianist was finally on the phone, he was gracious and talkative, with a soft Texas drawl.
From time to time, he would interrupt the conversation to gently scold his two little dogs, Ginger and Nikki, yipping in the background.
Cliburn had just returned from San Francisco, where he went to see the opera company there open its season with Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera. The cast included his friend, soprano Deborah Voigt, who is singing a recital at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center in January.
"I told her I was going to Tampa, too, and she was very cute and said, 'Warm the bench up for me,' " he said.
Cliburn is a big opera fan ("It is my favorite form of music, and has been since I was 4 years old and saw Carmen"), and he applies his childhood experience as a boy soprano in east Texas to his piano playing. In the Tchaikovsky First Concerto, he said, "I approach it from a vocal point of view. It's not a matter of tempi, it's a matter of line and phrasing."
Cliburn played the Tchaikovsky two years ago when he made his most recent return to the scene of his 1958 triumph, giving a performance at the Moscow Conservatory when Russian President Vladimir Putin awarded him the Order of Friendship. The concert was dedicated to children killed in the Beslan school terrorist attack.
"It was a heavy, heavy evening," Cliburn said. "Two days later, I gave a recital at the Pushkin Gallery. That was for the mommies and daddies. It was a real tear-jerker, very sad, so heart-rending."
The pianist makes no apologies for playing the same piece over and over. "It's like a great painting," he said. "Every time you go to a museum to see a great painting, you'll always see something you didn't see the time before. That's the same with great music, because you always hear something you didn't hear before. No matter how many times I have performed a work, I always restudy it."
Cliburn leaves little to chance when he performs with an orchestra. Unlike other soloists, he has his own Steinway trucked to every performance. And he said he continues to be diligent in his practice routine.
"I guess I've never enjoyed sitting down to practice, but after the first five minutes you're fine," he said. "The sad part about practicing is that there's no relation between practicing and playing the concert, because you're cleaning house in the practice, but you must produce something for the stage."
By "something," Cliburn meant an emotional or spiritual quality spontaneous to the moment of performance.
"The more you play, the more you learn about yourself, that is your great teacher, to perform," he said. "My mother used to say, 'When you go out on the stage, that is of course a lonely place, but it is the place where you rise and fall by your own decisions.' Each time really is like a learning experience.
"There's no insurance policy for a good performance. But you work to try to be prepared for that moment on the stage. I'll be practicing as if I were playing it for the first time."
John Fleming can be reached at (727) 893-8716 or fleming@sptimes.com
PREVIEW
Van Cliburn plays the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Florida Orchestra, Stefan Sanderling conducting, at 8 p.m. Monday at Mahaffey Theater, St. Petersburg. The program also includes the Mussorgsky/Ravel Pictures at an Exhibition. $75-$150. 813 286-2403 or toll-free 1-800-662-7286; www.floridaorchestra.org.