American Sputnik

The chandeliered, high-windowed concert hall of Moscow's Tchaikovsky State Conservatory echoed last week to the rubbery beat of Blue Moon and the striding chords of Embraceable You. Then a reedy Texas voice rose above the piano: "A-a-ah've got you un-dah mah skin!" The singer was long-legged, tousled Van Cliburn, 23, prize-winning pianist at the Tchaikovsky International Piano and Violin Festival (TIME, April 21 ), who had got under the Russian skin as no foreign artist had done in modern memory.

With his impromptu Rodgers-Gershwin-Porter recital, Cliburn warmed up to play the last movement of the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto at a concert of the leading prizewinners on the evening his victory was announced. He was called back for three encores, finally retired to shouts of "more" in English. As soon as the hall was empty, technicians scurried in, kept Cliburn at the keyboard until the early hours of morning while they reproduced his triumph on film.

"Vanyusha." So it went all through the week of triumph. He was besieged by professional offers and trailed by adoring crowds that recognized him on sight, called him first "Vanya'' (Little Van) and later "Vanyusha," an even more intimately endearing diminutive. His arrivals and departures at the conservatory set off small riots. Girls sent fresh blossoms to his practice room, and when word got around that he had lost weight and that he suffers from colitis, platoons of females turned up with bags of oranges. One determined girl even popped up in his room at the Hotel Peking in the middle of the night.

Official Russia, with an eye cocked to the propaganda values of Cliburn's triumph, was just as ecstatic. At a Kremlin reception, squat Premier Nikita Khrushchev threw his arms about Van's beanpole, 6-ft.-4-in. frame, asked him why he was so tall. Grinned Van: "Because I'm from Texas." At a second Kremlin reception, Khrushchev bore down on Cliburn with hands outstretched, jovially introduced him to his son, daughter and granddaughter. When a waiter appeared with champagne, teetotaling Van shifted from one foot to another, murmured "I really don't care for any," finally took a glass, clinked, sipped and discarded it. Even Nikolai Bulganin was at the party; with grave courtesy, Van addressed him as "Mr. Molotov."

$2,500 a Concert. Near exhaustion, Cliburn found time to chat for 40 minutes by phone with his parents back home in Kilgore, stop by the conservatory to have a life mask made for its collection. Then he traveled to Klin to play Tchaikovsky's piano, played by the greatest pianists on Tchaikovsky's birthday only. For Van they moved the birthday up several weeks. Finally, he played a solo recital at the conservatory auditorium to thunderous cheers, boarded the Red Arrow train to Leningrad, on the first leg of a tour to Riga, Kiev and Minsk.

From Europe and the U.S. the offers were pouring in: Dowager Queen Elisabeth of Belgium personally invited him to play at the Brussels World's Fair (he may do so, with the Philadelphia Orchestra); Impresario Sol Hurok, who once passed him up, tried unsuccessfully to get Cliburn under option; Ed Sullivan put in his bid for Cliburn's first Stateside TV appearance. Columbia Artists announced plans to bring over Moscow Conductor Kiril Kondrashin to accompany Cliburn on May 19 in a Carnegie Hall duplication of his prizewinning concert, with later performances in Philadelphia and Washington. Cliburn's concert fee jumped in a week from a top of $1,000 to $2,500 plus.

Ghosts & Feathers. What chiefly confounded the Americans in Moscow who have followed Van's career, e.g., Juilliard Dean Mark Schubart, Pianist Norman Shetler, is that he is not playing significantly better in Russia than he was able to play in the U.S. He has always had the technical equipment: the twelve-note span, the bravura style, the big percussive attack. But in preparation for his Moscow trip (which he says was revealed to him a year ago in a seance as a journey to "an agrarian country" where he would win a gold medal), Cliburn put in a grueling two months of six-to-eight-hours-a-day practice. During this period he may have sharpened some of the qualities that confounded Moscow critics: emotional nuances and inflections such as are normally heard only from string players; the special ghostly sonority that he can draw from the piano, as in the first movement of Rachmaninoff's Concerto No. 3; fast passages that combine a feathery sound with perfect, unblurred articulation.

Cliburn himself thinks that he was playing better in Moscow than he ever has before. Certainly it was his first hearing before such a knowledgeable, big-time audience. Trying last week to account for Van's sudden starry appearance in the musical firmament, a Radio Moscow interviewer put it this way: "He is the American Sputnik--developed in secret."

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