It is now 37 years since Van Cliburn – described in 1958 by Time magazine in honest-to-goodness vulgarity as “Liberace and Horowitz all rolled into one, a gangling blonde six footer, and as Texan as pecan pie” – took Moscow by storm. The outright winner of the first Tchaikovsky Competition his playing, particularly of the Russian romantics, left an indelible mark and an enduring legend.
Returning to these two wholly characteristic performances is to be forcibly reminded of his cardinal and unique qualities. Here, captured in RCA’s magnificent remastering, is that sumptuously rich and burnished tone, that generous elasticity of phrase and rhythm, that open-hearted rhetorical splendour. Tempos, as so often with Cliburn, are expansive, allowing him an imperial breadth and majesty. Listen to the fullness and clarity he finds in Schumann’s first movement passionato elaboration at 6'45'', or the way he sweeps all before him in the finale’s exultant conclusion. On the other hand Cliburn’s romantic generosity would probably have angered Prokofiev, whose austere performance of his own Third Concerto rejoiced in bleaker, more angular virtues. Yet even he, sarcastic and alert to all forms of excess, would surely have marvelled at the way every note is made audible in his teeming and scintillating score. Given such superb assurance the final variation in the second movement sounds more than ever like two different forms of motion proceeding simultaneously (“like a sprinter viewed from a train window”, as someone once delightfully put it) and, all in all, both performances provide awe-inspiring evidence of Cliburn’s once towering genius.
Pundits and would-be sophisticates may scoff, equating Cliburn’s free-flowing musicianship with a ‘lack of scholarship’ but in our own lean times, when emotional aridity is often applauded to the skies, such magnificence is doubly rewarding.'