Van Cliburn - Concert Pianist (With Audio CD)

Rating:
Summary: Those aren't the Himalayas, those are Van CLiburn's hands
Review: What you'll get here: 45 minutes of brief statements from people who
know him, a lot of clips of him in various locations, and 15 minutes of clips
from concerts. There are no complete
performances and there are no complete interviews.

It's well known that Van hated making recordings, hated forever carving
in stone the way he did something. For all the microphones and cameras
that surround him on this DVD, he's allowed virtually none of it to get
released. That makes this footage all the more precious.

Nowhere else in the world are you going to see as much of the living
breathing Van Cliburn in your TV. Nowhere else is there more footage
of his Tchaikovsky competition gala and nowhere else can you glimpse
more of him in solo recitals. You can rest assured this is the
absolute most footage of him you'll ever see.

The performance clips are from 2 concerts he gave in the late 50's in
Russia. Although the video is blurry, the sound is incredibly sharp,
undoubtedly recorded on separate equipment for an album which he never
cleared.

The few minutes of concert footage here reveal a much more vibrant,
spontaneous Cliburn than any of his studio recordings. It confirms his
belief in recordings as pristene references, live performances being
the only suitable time for spontaneity.

It's no secret that Van's early recordings are extremely rigid and
straightforward. Here for the first time we see what he was doing in
live performance during that same time period, and it's like a different pianist.

You see enough of his hands to discover he played with flat fingers
like Horowitz, stayed very close to the keyboard, and played everything
from the shoulder down. That technique resulted in the distinct,
brassy sound of his 1972 recordings but here we see it in 1960. It
took 10 years for him to transfer that tone quality to the studio.

Now there's nothing of the concerts after 1970. The accompanying CD
does not contain the performances that you see on the DVD although it
does contain the same songs. The CD is a reprint of the same studio
recordings you've known for the last 40 years. What those live
performances, especially the Chopin Scherzo, must have sounded like is
entirely up to your imagination.