Van Cliburn Happy to Be Back After an 11-Year Break : Music: Pianist says there is no substitute for live performance. He finds young people are discovering classical music and want to know about certain composers.

Van Cliburn decided in 1978, after a demanding, 20-year career as a concert pianist, to take a little intermission. He enjoyed it so much that it lasted more than a decade.

During those 11 years, Cliburn did practice, “but not like I was going to play Carnegie Hall.”

“I was so happy with life, to be able to be home. I got to eat regularly, which I never was able to do. I got to see my friends, and I was able to luxuriate in the sound and creativity of other performers.”

The night before Cliburn left his Ft. Worth home for New York, he heard Italian mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli. “When you hear a gorgeous voice like that,” he said, “you know why every instrumentalist listens, to learn how to breathe, phrase, extend a line and project a melody.

“That’s what is important about playing the piano--a really percussive instrument--to try to make it lyrical.”

Cliburn has long been admired for his large but non-percussive tone, as well as for the completeness of his technical command.

Cliburn, 59, said he didn’t miss performing during his “intermission.”

But now that he’s back on stage, he said, he doesn’t feel like he has put himself back into a straitjacket. “I love music.”

“It feels the same to be back playing concerts,” the pianist said. “Nothing has changed. Don’t you think that’s the beauty of classical music? You don’t have to reinvent yourself. What was good yesterday will still be good tomorrow. It doesn’t go out of style.”

But musical insights continue to come, he said, sometimes during practice. “Sometimes it’ll come during a concert. That can be some of the greatest instruction, that you’ve understood something.”

Cliburn is the only child of Harvey Lavan and Rildia Bee Cliburn. His mother was his only piano teacher until he entered the Juilliard School at 17. She listened to his serious practice in 1987 and said yes to his re-entry as a performer. He debuted at a White House state dinner for Mikhail Gorbachev. His 97-year-old mother, Cliburn said, is his “chief critic.”

Since he resumed giving concerts, Cliburn hasn’t performed a great deal. Sol Hurok booked a rigorous schedule for him in the years after he won the gold medal in the first Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958. His triumph came six months after the Soviets put Sputnik in space; the tall, slim, courtly Texan was acclaimed as a Cold War hero for America.

Now Cliburn intends to step up his pace, but the only upcoming concerts he has announced so far are with the Houston Symphony at the Woodlands on May 28 and with Chicago’s Grant Park Symphony on June 18.

He’s also going to record, Cliburn said. A recent promotional tour coincided with RCA Victor’s release of his Rachmaninoff “Piano Concerto No. 2” and Beethoven “Emperor Concerto,” from the early 1960s, remastered.

“Glenn Gould thought the day of the live concert was over,” he said. “He would do recordings. I always said, ‘Glenn, no, because this is so thrilling. When people would go to hear him, that was an experience right there. Live music-making--there is never going to be a substitute for that.”

In the last few years, he said, he found that young people are discovering classical music. “They express so much interest and want to know the history of certain composers and reasons behind certain compositions,” he said. “It is really extraordinary.”

It bothers Cliburn that some people don’t try listening to classical music because they think, “It’s too high for me. It’s out of human existence.”

“They’re put off by the idea of structure,” he said. “But it is so human. It is written for human beings. Beethoven said, ‘I wrote from the heart to the heart’ about his ‘Missa Solemnis.’ ”

The music he likes best to play, Cliburn said, is music by a composer whose intent was “to realize the potential of the piano, who tried to make it sing as well as have a big, organic sound like an orchestra.

“The longer I live, I realize I know very little. You find that you’re discovering and learning more with each day that goes by. It is wonderful. It keeps life very thrilling. I love to contemplate. I read a lot. If you have a book, it is to know that you are not alone. I love life, people, beauty and great music.”