Van Cliburn’s Return

Van Cliburn is back. Not on the concert platform--from which he retired in 1975 while barely past the age of 40--despite hopeful palpitations stemming from a brief glasnost /Gorbachev-related visit to the Reagan White House.

No, he’s back on recordings, being accorded the sort of full coverage by RCA, on its mid-price blue label, thus far reserved for such departed giants as Artur Rubinstein and Jascha Heifetz.

Is Cliburn in that class? Does he deserve it? Can one really answer such questions? Let’s give it a try.

When in 1958, in a burst of thaw-in-the-Cold War enthusiasm, the gangly 24-year-old Texan won first prize at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow and subsequent pop-star adulation, many wise heads predicted that he was cruising for a catastrophic fall.

Whether a fall actually took place is debatable. True, the heady days of 1958 eventually settled into a sort of curious status for Cliburn as Pension Fund icon, i.e., the household name required by the major symphony orchestra to employ as a fund-raising tool. On those occasions, his vehicles were almost inevitably the concertos of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff with which he pulled off his Moscow victory.

The question soon arose: Could he also play music that required not only the grand Romantic gesture and transcendent technique, but also repertory requiring more probing and subtle responses?

The answers tended to be equivocal, perhaps because in whatever Cliburn touched he could find no way of hiding his combination of splendid technical equipment and the ability to conjure a dazzling sensuousness of tone from his instrument. Cliburn, it seemed, was incapable of not creating gorgeous sounds.

RCA’s current release, comprising four individual CDs, tells these ears little that was wrong (one uses the past tense advisedly but with some confidence) with either his craft or his art and much that made him a national treasure.

The single solo program among the four (7941) has as centerpiece the overbearingly Slavic-suffering Second Sonata of Rachmaninoff, which Cliburn recorded live on his return to Moscow in 1960.

It is projected in great, glorious surges, with staggering strength and a degree of formal organization generally considered irrelevant to any consideration of this sprawling work. Playing, then, not only of supreme mechnical aptitude but of supreme interpretive intelligence.

And there are additional enticements in this program: the more hard-edged and taut, if even longer Sixth Sonata of Prokofiev, which Cliburn plays--as the composer himself may have--as a Romantic thriller with appliques of 20th-Century jaggedness, and short pieces by Rachmaninoff, Cliburn’s playing of which can only be described as on a par with the composer’s own.

The Second Piano Concerto of Brahms (7942) proves no less congenial territory, although the pianist’s way with it, recorded in 1961, may strike ears accustomed to the driving, less oratorical methods of, say, Ashkenazy or Pollini, as somewhat stuffy. Cliburn is partnered here by the Chicago Symphony under an occasionally fidgety Fritz Reiner, who in his tense, choppy phrasing of the main orchestral introduction hardly prepares us for the pianist’s majestic entry. But soon all becomes of a piece, and a very seductive one.

The accompanying material consists of solo pieces by Brahms: five Intermezzi from Opus 117 and Opus 119.

Again with Reiner and his Chicagoans, Cliburn presents broad but by no means flabby performances of what the oldtime naysayers (or at least naythinkers) suggested was unsuitable material: the G-major and “Emperor” Concertos of Beethoven (7943).

The G-major Concerto is projected with glorious breadth and sonority while the “Emperor” transmits a brighter, marginally more brittle and dashing mood that is decidedly apropos and sufficiently differentiated from the patented Cliburn lushness of tone and emotional generosity to give the impression that he does not see all music in a Romantic light.

Chopin’s E-minor Concerto (on 7945) is the least satisfying entity in the present series. The soloist’s approach is too magisterial, too solid and secure to project the wonted air of fragile dreaminess in the Romanze, while the momenum of the outer movements is thwarted by the heavy-footed accompaniment of Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

The coupling, Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, finds the same forces in livelier fettle, with Cliburn’s dexterity and arsenal of coloristic effects nothing less than astonishing.