Program: RACHMANINOV: Piano Concerto No. 2 (live performance, 1972); Piano Concerto No. 3 and encores (live performances, 1958) –
Performers: Val Cliburn, piano/ Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra / Kyril Kondrashin
Studio: VAI DVD 4454
Video: 4:3 fullscreen B&W
No Region Code
Length: 95 minutes
Rating: *****
There are professional musicians and pianists who have told me that Van Cliburn never equalled the incandescent form he showed in his “Winner’s Concerts” performances at the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958, including the First Concerto of Tchaikovsky and the Third of Rachmaninov. These were people who heard him in person and could never forget the experience. Unfortunately, many of them were more than disappointed in hearing him subsequently; they were, in fact, heartbroken, that the subsequent performances they heard were pale reflections of what he accomplished during that one magical stretch in the summer of 1958.
It was a stretch that was magical in more than just musical terms. In captivating the hearts of countless music lovers in the Soviet Union, and awakening the U.S. to the realization that Yankees, too, had a profoundly thrilling and deeply fulfilling role to play in the burgeoning classical music industry, Cliburn showed that music could provide a cultural bridge between peoples that transcended Cold War politics.
For those fans who can’t believe that the great pianist was anything but incandescent during his distinguished career, perhaps it was a case of what Keats said about the gulf between the blinding light of initial inspiration and the more subdued light of even the most brilliant finished poem. The difference was that, in the case of Van Cliburn, it was a young pianist with unsurpassed technical tools who seemed to have found a kind of twilight zone bounded only by his extraordinary emotional identification with and vulnerability to the composer’s dark and turbulent journey. It was the blinding light of Sergei Rachmaninov’s initial inspiration that was being approached if not entirely revealed.
Now, VAI Video enables us to experience what looks like the television broadcast of Cliburn’s legendary “Winner’s Concert” performance of Rachmaninov’s Third Concerto. The assortment of simple camera angles, in front of and behind the pianist, a few shots of the audience (some incongruously from seemingly separately-shot footage), facing the conductor and a few others in the Moscow Philharmonic, capture the growing involvement in the performance, by both the musicians and the audience, leading in an unbroken arc from Cliburn’s first hushed entrance to the triumphant close.
Like the film, the sound is also simple and grainy, the wind and brass solos edgy and even distorted at times, but the tone of the instruments is clearly recognizable, especially the vibrato-rich French horn and the plangent oboe, the strings have a passion comes across as if it were coming from the heart, and whatever limitations the piano sound suffers from are overcome by the intensity and poetry of the performance.
The great Kyril Kondrashin’s contribution cannot be overstated; watching him conduct is like having a tour guide showing us how the music is unfolding. He knows the music’s structure as if it he had drawn up the blueprints himself, and he relentlessly sensitive to and supportive of Cliburn’s unique journey. As this historical event is unfolding and everybody in the hall is becoming engulfed in the experience being generated by the music and the kid pianist, only Kondrashin remains above the fray – Olympian, powerful, commanding.
And then, of course, there is Cliburn himself. So achingly young and beautiful, so helplessly and completely seduced by the composer’s vision. After the performance, he barely keeps his giddy composure as young girls bring him flowers and, at the last, a balalaika. He plays three encores: Rachmaninov’s E-flat Prelude, Liszt’s glorious transcription of Schumann’s Widmung, and his own arrangement of Moscow Nights.
As Time magazine gushed in its May 19, 1958 cover story, “Van’s artistry is the kind that begins where technique leaves off. His expressiveness ranges from ghostly sonorities and harplike trills to ringing double octaves that cleave the orchestra like a sword.”
The performance of Rachmaninov’s Second Concerto from 1972 is infinitely more polished and, in a way, more conventionally powerful, but it is also routine. And while Van Cliburn’s brand of routine is pretty damn exciting, it pales before the magnificence of his youthful innocence, 14 years earlier.
– Laurence Vittes
