Hero's Return

While the flashbulbs flared, a reporter asked the question: How did Van Cliburn, hero returned from Moscow, feel about playing in Carnegie Hall before some of the biggest names in U.S. music? Drawled Van: "In general, I wish I didn't have to do it."

When he arrived, he had been virtually without sleep for two nights. Mobbed by the press and friends, he sandwiched in three Manhattan rehearsals with Soviet Conductor Kiril P. Kondrashin and the Symphony of the Air. The queues for standing room started forming outside Carnegie-Hall early in the morning, and nearly an hour before the concert the hall began filling. Van himself arrived backstage five minutes after Conductor Kondrashin had launched the orchestra into Prokofiev's Classical Symphony. Before his cue came, he prayed. Then the 6-ft. 4-in. Texan strode onstage and proved to doubters that he was up to his billing: one of the most abundantly gifted piano talents of his time.

Emotion & Poise. Pianist Cliburn played the two main pieces with which he won first prize at the International Tchaikovsky Competition: Tchaikovsky's Concerto No. 1, Rachmaninoff's Concerto No. 3. The conception in both was sweeping, the technique so sure that he rippled off the Rachmaninoff without cuts and with the finger-cracking cadenza that the pianist-composer himself chose not to play. Despite a few nervous smashes in the opening Tchaikovsky, he played with such bravura and nuance that the audience paid him the rare tribute of thunderous applause between movements. After both concertos, as he rushed to embrace Conductor Kondrashin, he won shouting, standing ovations--and a deep-throated roar when he finally sat down to his encores : Rachmaninoff's Etude Tableau, the finale of Samuel Barber's Sonata and the Schumann-Liszt Widmung. The critics chimed in with the crowd. Sample: the New York Times's Ross Parmenter called Cliburn "a major talent," found that he "lived up to expectations."

Next day Van piled into an open car and drove in a tickertape-strewn motorcade up Broadway behind three high school bands. At City Hall, Mayor Robert Wagner produced a scroll proclaiming "Van Cliburn Day," while teen-agers and office workers milled about gawking at Van ("He's cuter than Tony Perkins!").

Profit in His Own Land. In midweek Van moved to Philadelphia and the same kind of reception. After his concert at the Academy of Music, he escaped through a shrieking crowd that tore the handles from the doors of his limousine. In Washington, before his concert at Constitution Hall, he went to the White House with his parents and Conductor Kondrashin. President Eisenhower gave him a preperformance pep talk: "After that kind of ordeal over there, you will be all right." Cliburn hit Constitution Hall like a landslide, stayed for lunch in the Senate Dining Room with the congressional delegation from Texas. At week's end he returned to Manhattan to appear on TV's Steve Allen Show and to get ready for his first RCA Victor recording of the Tchaikovsky concerto (first pressing: 150,000 copies).

Along with Cliburn's mounting profit in his own land, the Russians paid him yet another tribute--perhaps the rarest yet--by taking a hard look at their own piano talent. Wrote Critic Z. Vartanyan in the journal Soviet Culture: "The majority of our musicians participating in the [Tchaikovsky] competition turned out to resemble each other very much in their creative character . . . The mass shortcoming of our musicians is their leveling."

Through the triumphant week, Van kept his balance and his composure. Only two things still eluded him: enough sleep, and the chance he wanted "to get away for a while and simply think."

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