By Editorial Staff

AS WE go to press, Vladimir Horowitz is only now preparing his second concert in over a dozen years. Yet there was little doubt in anyone’s mind that just one concert, last May 9, made him the leading contender for MUSICAL AMERICA’s Musician of the Year. The mere announcement of that concert thrilled the music world as few others have done in recent memory.

Carnegie Hall’s box office opened on Monday, April 26, for tickets to the Horowitz concert. On Saturday, excited concertgoers began to stake out claims on the Fifty-Seventh Street sidewalk. Sunday evening, as the Munich Bach Orchestra was concluding its New York series with the St. John Passion, rain began to fall heavily. Still the line outside grew and, with makeshift tents hastily arranged from raincoats, ponchos, and perhaps a linoleum tablecloth or two, the soaking crowd braved the night. Most of those who waited for the rain to stop, joining the line early Monday morning, were too late to reap the harvest of tickets.

It was not always so. When Vladimir Horowitz, aged twenty-three, made his American debut on January 12, 1928, the pre-concert acclaim went to the conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham, also making his debut here. The press was even more excited by better-known musical debutants, for during that week Andres Segovia and Maurice Ravel were to perform for the first time in America, Bernardino Molinari had just arrived for his initial visit to New York to conduct the Philharmonic, and everybody was still agog over Bartók, who had debuted only a fortnight earlier. That was the week that was! As MUSICAL AMERICA murkily saw it, “We now have with us—if one can remember them all—Maurice Ravel of France; Bela Bartók, from Hungary; Sir Thomas Beecham, the Britisher; Bernardino Molinari, the Italian, and Alexander Tansman, the Polish Parisian. There is also Vladimir Horowitz, a Russian, but he is neither composer nor conductor, like the rest, merely a pianist; besides, the Russians we always have with us and an extra one more or less doesn’t in itself seem to be anything prodigious.”

The joint Horowitz-Beecham debut—a musical duel that saw the fiery soloist trying to take the Tchaikovsky B minor Concerto at a hair-raising clip only to be continually brought up short by the conductor’s insistently leisurely pace—has now passed into legend. Horowitz became the world’s most sought-after piano virtuoso. For a quarter of a century he never failed to astound audiences by the sheer phenomenon of his technical mastery of the seemingly impossible. He was known as the “virtuoso, who could—and can—play more notes faster than any other piano player.”

Yet, although he might create hysteria with his Liszt, or his incredible transcriptions like The Stars and Stripes Forever, nobody could forget the few times he would play Mozart, intensely picking out every appoggiatura as if he were himself composing the music then and there. As Grove’s Dictionary states, he was one of those “who raise the term ‘virtuoso’ to a connotation above the ordinary.”

In 1953 he stopped concertizing, preferring to stay at home in New York and make his public music for the microphones. A switch to Columbia Records from RCA Victor with which latter company he had long been identified and for whom he had recorded several now-classic discs with his father-in-law, Arturo Toscanini—gave a new impetus to his recording career. Each of his new recordings in turn shot to the top of Billboard’s “bestseller” list. Entreaties were made for him to return to the concert stage.

Then at one of his recording sessions, appropriately at Carnegie Hall, Horowitz met a New York Times music reviewer who, although he had been writing reviews for many years—including laudatory reviews of the Horowitz recordings—had never before had the opportunity to hear the pianist “live.” A whole musical generation had grown up without this opportunity, and when the reviewer told Horowitz that “recordings don’t do you justice ... you are like another pianist” (see HIGH FIDELITY /MUSICAL AMERICA, October 1965), Vladimir Horowitz decided to resume concertizing.

The May 9 concert, as everybody knows, lived up to all expectations. The Times’s headline the following morning put it succinctly: “Still Horowitz, Still the Champ.”