Horowitz in Moscow: SRO and Bravos

Vladimir Horowitz gave a concert Sunday that drew raves from scores of gate-crashing students and a VIP audience in the land where he began to play the piano more than 75 years ago.

Horowitz, who came back to the Soviet Union for the first time since 1925 to perform in Moscow and Leningrad, was deeply moved by the audience reaction to his sentimental journey.

“They are very sweet to me here,” he said after he took six bows and received an eight-minute standing ovation for his concert in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory.

Later, at an American Embassy dinner in his honor, the 81-year-old Horowitz playfully kept time with his knife and fork on his plate and glassware while a balalaika band performed the Gypsy Dance from Bizet’s “Carmen.”

At the concert, his interpretations of works by Scarlatti, Mozart, Schubert, Liszt and Chopin were greeted with enthusiasm. But the loudest applause came when he performed two etudes by Russian composers Alexander Scriabin and Sergei Rachmaninoff.

“His music is disembodied--it’s bits of beauty floating through the air,” said Sergei Polusmak, a pianist who studied under Horowitz’s late sister, Regina, in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov.

Horowitz was the first American artist to appear in the Soviet Union under a new cultural agreement with the United States. Although he played without any fee, the receipts from television rights sold in the United States and Europe will bring in an estimated $1 million.

Georgy Ivanov, Soviet deputy minister of culture, was the highest-ranking Kremlin official to attend the Horowitz concert, but several Communist Party leaders came to see the man often called the world’s greatest concert pianist.

The wife of Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze joined the festive crowd, along with diplomats invited by U.S. Ambassador Arthur A. Hartman and his wife, Donna.

Students Most Enthusiastic

But the most enthusiastic concert-goers were scores of young students who got into the hall without tickets by storming the doors despite the best efforts of police and ushers.

The gate-crashers sat or stood in the aisles, mainly in the balcony, and were among the first to shout “Bravo!” after Horowitz finished a piece.

While the hall seats about 1,800, the ticketless contingent may have added another several hundred to the attendance, judging by the jammed aisles.

Horowitz gave a self-deprecating wave of his right hand after the first round of stormy applause greeted three Scarlatti sonatas.

He waved off a woman who tried to give him a bouquet of flowers--a traditional tribute to performing artists--and walked slowly from the hall after playing Mozart’s Sonata in C.

Then, with bravos echoing through the hall after the Rachmaninoff and Scriabin works, Horowitz gave a giant shrug to acknowledge applause and blew a kiss to Donna Hartman as she presented a floral tribute.

After concluding his formal program with Chopin’s Polonaise in A Flat, Horowitz left the stage, cupping his hands over his ears in mock protest at the deafening applause.

After two encores and an eight-minute ovation, Horowitz comically gestured as if he wanted to throw people out of the hall. Accepting his wishes, the crowd straggled away.

“We love him so much,” said a young music student who had slipped into the concert without a ticket.

“He always belonged here. . . . He has come back to the source of his artistry,” said a woman who identified herself only as Okshana.

As a boy, Horowitz played for Scriabin and won his approval. Rachmaninoff, he has said, was one of his closest friends in the world of music.

Born in Kiev in the Ukraine, Horowitz began to play the piano at the age of 6 under the tutelage of his mother, an accomplished musician. At 12, he was enrolled in the Kiev Conservatory of Music, and he made his debut at age 17.

A Revolutionary Hero

In the early years after the Bolshevik Revolution, however, life was hard and his middle-class parents were struggling to make a living. Horowitz’s concerts literally put bread on the table for his family in the early 1920s. At that time, he was hailed as a revolutionary hero.

But he and others decided to go to Western Europe to pursue their musical careers. Horowitz left in 1925, never to return until his arrival in Moscow last Monday.

He once vowed never to return to the land of his birth, but--as his wife, Wanda, said this week--”he changed his mind.” Once here, Horowitz had a family reunion with his niece, Elena Dolberg of Kharkov, and her husband, Mikhail. They had aisle seats for Sunday’s concert and spent most of the week with the uncle she last saw as a girl of 6 in 1925.

When he arrived from Paris last week, Horowitz seemed to be weary from the four-hour air trip. During the week, however, he seemed to rebound. At the concert, he became playful at times, mugging for the television cameras and the audience.

Sometimes Played for Laughs

With his expressive eyes, large nose and quick grin, Horowitz seems born for the role of clown, and he often played for laughs. At one point, he picked up a flower thrown on the stage and sniffed with exaggerated pleasure.

“He wanted to say goodby to his homeland,” one Soviet woman told a reporter.

Horowitz is scheduled to play a concert in Leningrad next Sunday, with much the same program.