Intermission Over for Cliburn : Pianist Plans Return to Recording, Touring

NEW YORK —  Pianist Van Cliburn, who at 23 won the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow and came back a national hero, indicated he is planning to return to public life after a 10-year absence.

In a rare interview, the 53-year-old pianist said that he is considering some “very lovely invitations” to perform and is discussing possible future recordings as well as additional reissues on compact disc of his earlier RCA Victor recordings.

Cliburn’s reemergence is not a total surprise. The so-called “American Sputnik,” who helped millions of parents convince millions of children that piano lessons could lead to fame and fortune, has been moving back into the limelight for a few months now.

On Dec. 3, Cliburn came out of his professional hiatus to perform for the Reagans and Gorbachevs at the White House. He has talked about touring Russia next season, although a possible tour of the U.S.S.R. with the New York Philharmonic fell through. Cliburn performed Jan. 2 at the opening of the Bob Hope Cultural Center.

Currently living in Fort Worth, Tex., Cliburn said he plans to play New York’s Carnegie Hall “eventually,” and that he never really stopped playing. “I wouldn’t say I was practicing like I was going to be playing a concert the next day,” he said, “but music is my life.”

That life has been largely a private one, however, since Cliburn left the stage after a 1978 concert in Toledo, Ohio.

“Performing is a very solitary profession,” Cliburn said. “I’m very gregarious and outgoing, and preparing for a concert was always very hard for me because you have to be alone. You must work by yourself. It’s a very solitary working condition, particularly when you wish to be doing things socially and you can not, and at times you must not.”

He wanted more. After the death in 1974 of, first, his father, then two months later his manager, Sol Hurok, Cliburn said he started thinking about mortality and how “the stage is wonderful but that’s not the most important thing in my life. People are the most important thing in my life. And I wanted to have time to be able to see friends and go to performances.”

His support of the Fort Worth-based Cliburn International Piano Competition, held every four years, keeps him active in the musical world, and he appears to enjoy that world’s social aspects. He received considerable attention at a post-concert reception after pianist Barry Douglas’ Carnegie Hall recital last Friday, and, despite his long career “intermission,” still drew requests for autographs and awed conversation from young musicians and others.

“Very few musicians have the courage to step back from their careers and take a view of the world,” said Michael Emmerson, president of BMG Classics (whose affiliates include the classical label RCA Victor Red Seal).

“Generally, musicians are terrified of being forgotten. They worry that their public will disappear. But I think that Van, in his early 40s, after 20 years on the treadmill, needed to get off. He needed to live life. But I think that now he has an urge to resume in full measure the career that is his. Van Cliburn is the pre-eminent American musician. He is the original local boy made good.”

Cliburn recorded 27 albums between 1958 and 1975, said his longtime executive producer, Jack Pfeiffer, at RCA Victor Red Seal. Among them were his signature Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto and Rachmaninoff’s Third, both recently reissued in CD format. Other recordings, some of which are also destined for CDs, include Beethoven and Chopin sonatas, concertos by Beethoven, Brahms and Liszt, and such recordings as “My Favorite Chopin” and “My Favorite Encores.”

Emmerson hosted a reception for Cliburn here Monday to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the pianist’s Moscow triumph. Cliburn, his mother and other guests from Texas and New York joined assorted record executives over tea, fresh strawberries and pastries. The event was also planned to introduce Cliburn to all the new people at RCA Victor--”he knows the old-timers,” Emmerson said.

“Van Cliburn is one of the great Americans of the 20th Century,” Emmerson said, “and the fact that he has been away from the concert hall and away from the recording studio for a whole decade is a tragedy.

“My belief is that we will get him back to the recording studio and back to the concert hall, that he will come back refreshed and with a new energy and vigor and will be seen in a new light as one of the great artists of the ‘90s, not simply as a Moscow prize-winner.”

Coming up over the next 12 months are at least five more compact-disc reissues and, possibly, some new recordings, RCA Victor executives said.

“We have simply agreed that it’s imperative for him to get back into the studio and back to the concert hall,” said Emmerson. The reissues “are only the beginning. Look, Mr. Horowitz is 83. Rubinstein played until he was 92. Given Van Cliburn at 53, he’s only halfway through his career.”