Entertainment

Fifty years ago, Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House, Nikita Khrushchev newly installed at the Kremlin. With Europe rebuilding from World War II devastation, the superpowers were locked in a deadly Cold War dance, shadowed by the atomic bomb and the newly launched satellite Sputnik.

The 1958 launch in Moscow of the International Tchaikovsky Competition, for pianists and violinists, wasn't innocent of propaganda agendas. Given Russia's grand legacy of musical virtuosos, it was expected to be a showcase for Soviet cultural superiority.

To worldwide astonishment, though, the first prize in piano went to a gangly, drawling 23-year-old Texan. So loaded had the contest been that Van Cliburn's award had to be approved by Khrushchev himself.

Overnight, the 6-foot-4 Mr. Cliburn was the world's most famous musician–the American Idol of his day, but much more so. His open-faced, all-American good looks were splashed across newspapers and magazines – and then-new television screens – around the world. A Time magazine cover hailed the "Texan Who Conquered Russia." He returned to a ticker-tape parade in New York.

The 50th anniversary of Mr. Cliburn's legendary triumph is being celebrated Saturday in Fort Worth, where the pianist has lived since 1986. Invitation-only festivities will be held on the grounds of the Kimbell Art Museum, in a custom tent evoking a grand Russian palace, complete with chandeliers and damask linens.

Van Cliburn Foundation

Van Cliburn at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory during the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition.

Mr. Cliburn exploded on the scene in a one-time confluence of economics and politics, cultural aspirations and hotly competitive mass media that still considered high culture core content.

Amid postwar prosperity, America craved cultural respectability. New opera companies were springing up and orchestras expanded seasons. The nonprofit group Community Concerts and long-playing records brought classical music into the hinterlands.

The 1950s saw the rise of a whole generation of gifted American pianists, most trained by Russian, Austrian and German émigrés snatched up by American conservatories.

But early promises were not entirely realized. Several pianists died young. Others were sidelined by physical problems. Only a few had long and honorable concert careers, but without quite gaining star status.

And scarcely a decade after his Moscow triumph, Mr. Cliburn seemed to hit the doldrums. He kept up a dizzying schedule of concerts, but many performances sounded merely well-groomed, sometimes even distracted.

"There were a great number of concerts that people wanted," the pianist recalled in an interview this week. "I said, 'If I have the strength, I'll try to do this' ... It isn't difficult to play the concert if you can get there and be rested," he says. "That wasn't always the case."

Twenty years after Moscow, Mr. Cliburn withdrew from the stage. When he returned after another decade there were glimpses of the old grandeur, but his tone had hardened and his memory and technique had become less reliable. He has performed only occasionally in more recent years, still drawing rapturous ovations but also some critical throat-clearing. Today his fame is sustained by the quadrennial Fort Worth piano competition that bears his name.

"When he came back, I thought the light had gone out," says Bryce Morrison, a London critic and piano professor.

Born July 12, 1934, in Shreveport, La., Harvey Lavan Cliburn Jr. was the son of an oilman and a piano teacher who'd studied with Arthur Friedheim, a Russian-born protégé of Franz Liszt. When he was 6, the Cliburn family moved to the oil boomtown Kilgore.

His mother, Rildia Bee O'Bryan Cliburn, would be Van Cliburn's most enduring influence. Even after the young pianist went off to New York's Juilliard School, to study with the formidable Russian teacher Rosina Lhévinne, Mrs. Cliburn would be his musical coach and career adviser until her death in 1994.

Although it boasted an international jury, headed by the celebrated Russian pianist Emil Gilels, the inaugural Tchaikovsky Competition was dominated by jurors from Soviet bloc countries. In a time when everything in the Soviet Union, including the arts, was centrally controlled, the young Russian pianist Lev Vlasenko was rumored to be the official favorite.

Russian pianists then and now were known for burly virtuosity. Paralleling the crisp modernism of 1950s architecture, Mr. Cliburn's American contemporaries tended to favor a crew-cut objectivity – and an "anything you can play, I can play faster" brilliance.

At its youthful best, Mr. Cliburn's playing couldn't have been more different from all his competitors'. His long fingers somehow coaxed a massive, bass-rich sound that never turned bangy. His interpretations often favored unhurried grandeur.

That rich tone was a legacy from his mother. In lessons "when she gave the first prelude and fugue of Bach, she made me sing the theme," he recalls. "She wanted me to feel the connection with the human voice, because it is the first instrument."

To the Russians, especially, Mr. Cliburn seemed a heartwarming throwback to lost glories of romantic pianism. "His playing sounded the most Russian of anyone," observed Mr. Vlasenko, who ended up with second prize in 1958. "I mean, he was more Russian than we were. And after all these dismal years [in Stalinist Russia], Van was like a ray of sun penetrating the clouds."

His accomplishment, as one critic wrote, was analogous to a Russian pianist playing Gershwin more idiomatically than a whole bunch of Americans.

The Moscow audiences immediately took to this curly-headed youngster with the ready smile, the nice mamma's boy who didn't smoke or drink.

"Van looked and played like some kind of angel," the Russian pianist Andrei Gavrilov told Cliburn biographer Howard Reich. "He didn't fit the evil image of capitalists that had been painted for us by the Soviet government."

Mr. Cliburn was a familiar face on television through the 1950s and '60s. In demand everywhere, he took advantage of proliferating air travel to keep up a whirlwind schedule of performances and recordings unimaginable a generation before.

Eventually, as he told a Vogue interviewer, he got "tired of living out of a suitcase, flying nearly every day, never having a home. I could never go to the opera, which I adore, or a friend's concert, or a movie. By 1978 I was ready to be bored for a while, to have a regular life. I wanted a house with all my things around me."

AP

Van Cliburn with Pres. Harry S. Truman in 1962.

In 1986 he found that home in an 18-acre Westover Hills estate that had belonged to Kay Kimbell, the Fort Worth entrepreneur who endowed the Kimbell Art Museum.

By all accounts, Mr. Cliburn was a far happier man once he got out of the concert rat race. He was still free to perform whenever the notion struck him, for audiences still thrilled to see and hear a legend. And there were recordings to prove that, at least for a time, he was one of the 20th-century's greatest pianists.

"He will be judged as an individual who went his own way," says Yoheved Kaplinsky, chair of the piano department at the Juilliard School, a professor at Texas Christian University and a juror in the Cliburn Competition.

"He chose at one point to withdraw from the playing field and support it in another way, through the Van Cliburn Foundation.

"He will also be judged as someone whose performances in their prime were second to none."

The Van Cliburn Foundation celebrates the 50th anniversary of its namesake's great leap to stardom with an invitation-only gala Saturday evening on the Kimbell Museum lawn in Fort Worth.

DMN File

Van Cliburn with his mother, Rildia Bee, at their home in Fort Worth in 1993

They're a few weeks early. Mr. Cliburn, then 23, actually won the Moscow of the International Tchaikovsky Competition in April 1958.

He was golden from his opening notes – in the first round he won an eight-minute standing ovation. A few more little-known facts:

•He is the only classical musician ever given a ticker-tape parade in New York City.

•He has performed for every United States president since 1958, and for both President Reagan and the Soviet Union's Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987.

•Hollywood has offered him two film roles. He declined both.

•Police estimated that 350,000 attended a 1994 Cliburn concert with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Grant Park.

•Live coverage of the quadrennial Cliburn piano competition is available worldwide via the Internet. The 13th competition will be May 22 to June 7, 2009.

Source: Van Cliburn Foundation

Recordings

Archive

Van Cliburn at age 9

•Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No. 1 One of the classic performances of this warhorse, taped shortly after Mr. Cliburn's return from the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition. The conductor, Kiril Kondrashin, is the same who accompanied Mr. Cliburn's competition performance of the piece, although here working with the RCA Symphony Orchestra. The performance has a spacious nobility that seems an exhalation from an imperial Russia long gone. (Coupled with Rachmaninoff Second Concerto, with Fritz Reiner leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; RCA Red Seal.)

•Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 3 From the same year, with Kondrashin conducting the Symphony of the Air. The performance begins with a kind of wide-eyed freshness. In the larger of the composer's two alternative cadenzas, then rarely played, the slowly gathering force is hair-raising. But even at its climax, the sound is huge without banging. At a daringly slow tempo, the central Intermezzo is sheer magic, sounding made up on the spot. (Coupled with Prokofiev Third Concerto, with Walter Hendl leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; RCA Red Seal.)

•Rachmaninoff: Sonata No. 2 (original version). In somewhat raw sonics, a live 1960 performance of startling passion, but with the slow movement inhabiting a dream world. (Coupled with 1970s recordings of seven Rachmaninoff preludes and an etude-tableau; RCA Red Seal.)

Nathan Hunsinger / DMN

Alexander Kobrin is congratulated by Van Cliburn after winning the gold medal in the Van Cliburn piano competition at Bass Hall in 2005.

DVDs

•Van Cliburn: Concert Pianist Includes footage from the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition plus a CD of additional performances. (1996, Peter Rosen, producer, RCA Red Seal)

•Van Cliburn: A Portrait (1966, from the Bell Telephone Hour, VAI).

On YouTube.com

Selections include movements and excerpts from Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 (the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition performance), Beethoven Emperor and Brahms Second concertos (from the 1962 Russian return tour) and the Schumann/Liszt "Widmung."

Scott Cantrell