The two most frequently asked questions around here these days are: (1) Can I still get tickets to Tuesday's Van Cliburn concert? And (2) do you think there's going to be a Van Cliburn concert?
As to the first, tickets to his Tuesday, July 26, appearance with the Moscow Philharmonic were gone within days of being placed on sale last month. The Utah Symphony box office is still taking names for a waiting list, but that is currently up to 10 pages. So the chances of getting in at this point are slim indeed.And the second? Well, that's a little more complex.
So far the Texas pianist's tour, his first in 16 years, has not been trouble-free. Apart from a memory slip in the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto, one gathers things went well enough at the "preview" concert two weeks ago in San Diego. Not so the July 11 followup at the Hollywood Bowl.
There Cliburn, a day short of his 60th birthday, complained of dizziness following a first half that consisted of him narrating Copland's "Lincoln Portrait" and soloing in - what else? - the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto. The result was that, following intermission, he scrapped the Rachmaninoff concerto altogether, instead performing four shorter solo pieces, all standard Cliburn encores.
At the time, many were inclined to write it off as the kind of thing that happens to a lot of concert artists, even those in the superstar category. Cliburn, we were told, had had an unexpectedly tiring weekend, including what he described as a 15- to 20-minute soundcheck that "turned into a full two-hour rehearsal." He also cannot have been insensitive to the panoramic acoustics of the bowl, with its 14,000-plus audience, or a national media blitz that reportedly even brought the roar of helicopters into the picture.
But the fact remains that such things are not unprecedented in Cliburn's career. Even before the 11-year performing hiatus (or "intermission," as he calls it) that made his return to the concert platform in 1989 such big news, he was known to show up late for performances.
One such delay in 1965 caused a last-minute reshuffling of his National Symphony program. A few months before, he had also been late for a recital in Chicago. And as recently as three years ago I remember waiting nearly an hour for him to come onstage for a solo recital in Kalamazoo, Mich.
I also think it's significant that, whatever the vagaries of that weekend, subsequent concerts on his current tour have kept to the altered Hollywood Bowl format.
That means that, contrary to what the naysayers were predicting, he has gone ahead with tour dates in Dallas and St. Louis and, as of this writing, is expected to do the same with Denver and Salt Lake City. But the program no longer includes the Rachmaninoff Third, featuring him only in the Copland, the Tchaikovsky and, presumably, another selection of solo pieces.
With some artists, that might diminish public interest, but not Van Cliburn. After all, people - and not just regular concertgoers - have been beating down the doors to hear him play the Tchaikovsky concerto ever since it, together with the Rachmaninoff, swept him to victory in the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.
That victory, in turn, swept him to an overnight prominence accorded no other pianist before or since. Given the political climate between the United States and the Soviet Union at the time, I expect any American's victory in that particular competition would have made headlines. But the cover of Time magazine and a ticker-tape parade through Manhattan? These are the kinds of accolades previously reserved for the likes of Lindbergh, not Liszt or even Horowitz.
A lesser artist might have crumbled under the pressure. But, to his credit, the 23-year-old pianist from Kilgore, Texas, delivered the goods not only personally but musically. Politics, Cliburn professed, were not his domain. He loved the Russian people the same way he loved his fellow Texans, for their warmth, kindness and generosity.
In much the same fashion, he quickly won over the rest of America. Just as his playing, with its warmth and emotional expanse, had even the competition judges embracing him in Moscow, so his homecoming performances touched audiences and critics alike.
For here was a competition winner who didn't play like a competition winner. Instead of going for speed and volume, he usually went for the music's poetry, letting his still-impressive keyboard sound ride naturally above the orchestra. I will remain convinced to my dying day that this, as much as anything else, is what made his recording of the Tchaikovsky go platinum. Publicity, after all, can only do so much.
Whether his subsequent career has been all platinum is another matter.
Certainly by the mid-1970s the strain had begun to tell. Though Cliburn always has had a broader repertoire than the Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff concertos, those were the pieces the public and, by extension, concert presenters clamored to hear from him time and again. I remember his last appearance here, in 1977, when he once again found the magic in the Tchaikovsky, but not without a fair number of mistakes. According to biographer Howard Reich, even his record producers noticed the old bite was missing and, though still in his early 40s, he seemed tired.
So, like so many other pianists of his generation, he dropped out, though maybe not for the same reasons. With Fleisher, Janis and Graffman, it was physical problems. With Cliburn it seems to have been emotional. Eventually he settled with his mother in Fort Worth to be near the piano competition that, since 1962, has borne his name.
An inveterate night owl, he was not invisible during those years. But most of his time was apparently spent at home with his music, his books and his poetry. As he told one interviewer, "To feel life, this is terribly important to me."
To some, this would seem a strange way to do it. However, in 1987 Cliburn broke his self-imposed exile to perform at a White House dinner honoring the Gorbachevs. The response was positive enough that 1 1/2 years later he made his first public appearance in more than a decade with the Philadelphia Orchestra, again in the Tchaikovsky concerto, along with the Liszt E flat major, followed by an enthusiastically received tour of the Soviet Union.
At least it was enthusiastically received by the public. Later I spoke with a Russian musician who had heard and loved Cliburn's playing in 1958. What, I asked him, was it like in 1989? "The shell without the crab," he said sadly, and to some extent that was what I had heard in 1991 in Kalamazoo.
There, interspersed with a lot of talk, was the same quietly majestic keyboard presence, and sound, that had held the world captive in 1958 (though, for what it is worth, his first "Tonight Show" appearance had taken place three years earlier). What was not always present was the inner poetry that had, for me, lifted his playing even in the years when he was gradually letting his concert schedule run out of steam.
Oh, it was still there, but too often compromised by an occasional rhythmic and emotional slackness and a tendency to go for the obvious, something likewise true of his sentimentally long-winded speechifying.
Nor am I the only one to have been saying so. A review of a recent Tchaikovsky concerto performance in Houston described his playing as "ferociously compelling at one moment and technically troubled at the next." Some of the Hollywood Bowl reviews took a similar tack, the one in USA Today placing much of the blame on the orchestra and its conductor, Vassily Sinaisky.
In one important respect, Tuesday's concert will be very different from that. According to Bruce Granath of Space Agency Concerts and Theatricals, the Salt Lake group that helped put the entire 16-city tour together, Abravanel Hall, with its 2,800 seats, is "by almost 1,500 seats the smallest venue on the tour."
That means Utahns will get to hear Cliburn in more intimate surroundings than his free concert in Chicago's Grant Park last month that, according to some estimates, drew as many as 350,000 people. (Reportedly he had originally requested the Salt Lake Tabernacle.)
But as to what they will hear - well, I'll be as interested to discover that as anyone.