Vladimir Horowitz

Born in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1904, Horowitz had already made a name for himself in Russia before he turned 20. He started playing the piano at the age of six with his mother, and later studied at the Kiev Conservatoire with Vladimir Pukhalsky, Sergei Tarnovsky and Felix Blumenfeld. In this period he was also active as a composer, writing miniatures and piano transcriptions. His fame began to spread when he left Russia for Germany in 1925 and he was immediately recognised as a sensational new talent, particularly after a tremendous success in Hamburg with Tchaikovsky’s B Flat Minor Concerto, resulting in appearances in England and France. Making his American debut in 1928, he became known as the most virtuosic of all virtuosos, and each concert was an event of unprecedented significance. In 1953, Horowitz withdrew from the clamour that had surrounded his every appearance and he subsequently avoided public exposure. He did, however, make recordings and devoted much time to studying new works. Horowitz’s reputation as the “Liszt of our age” or “virtuoso without limits” stemmed also from his numerous recordings. Some of his interpretations on disc, such as the 1930 recording of Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto or Liszt’s B Minor Sonata have attained historic significance. They document that the young Horowitz had not merely earned his name as the “tornado from the steppes”, as concert critics called him, but that he was also a musician with a highly developed sense of form. In his extensive discography, his recordings of Chopin, Schumann and Rachmaninov abound. Horowitz also devoted special attention to the music of Scriabin and Scarlatti. But his repertoire didn’t fail to include works by the Vienna classicists. The most famous of his concerto recordings is the 1943 production of the Tchaikovsky B Flat Minor Concerto with his father-in-law Arturo Toscanini. His historic comeback in 1965 at Carnegie Hall was the first of the relatively few public recitals he was to give, most of them on Sunday afternoons at Carnegie, and in the 1980s, he started to agree to short journeys outside the United States. For most Europeans, Horowitz had remained an American legend for many years, but in 1982, he returned to London to give his first concerts there in over 28 years, and in 1985, travelled to Milan and Paris for his first recitals on the continent in over three decades. Horowitz also re-established contact with Hamburg, where his international career had begun in 1926, by announcing that Deutsche Grammophon was his new recording partner. 61 years after leaving Russia, Horowitz gave memorable recitals in Moscow and Leningrad and he remained active until the end of his life, also returning to the studio as an 81-year-old pianist. He recorded a CD just 10 days before his death in New York of a heart attack at the age of 86 in 1989.