When the World Stopped to Listen

Van Cliburn’s Cold War Triumph and Its Aftermath

By: Stuart Isacoff, Claire Bloom - director

Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki

Length: 7 hrs and 59 mins

Publisher's summary

April of 1958 - the Iron Curtain was at its heaviest, and the outcome of the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition seemed preordained. Nonetheless, as star musicians from across the globe descended on Moscow, an unlikely favorite emerged: Van Cliburn, a polite, lanky Texan whose passionate virtuosity captured the Russian spirit.

This is the story of what unfolded that spring - for Cliburn and the other competitors, jurors, party officials, and citizens of the world who were touched by the outcome. It is a behind-the-scenes look at one of the most remarkable events in musical history, filled with political intrigue and personal struggle as artists strove for self-expression and governments jockeyed for prestige. And, at the core of it all: the value of artistic achievement, the supremacy of the heart, and the transcendent freedom that can be found, through music, even in the darkest moments of human history.

©2017 Stuart Isacoff (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Inspirational biography of Van Cliburn

I am not a musician, nor a classical music devotee; I remembered the name of Van Cliburn, and am glad I read this book.

East Texas Takes Moscow - 1958

And then the ticker tape in New York City. Fiction can't be better than this. It should be a movie. High Noon meets The Russians are Coming.

I was born in 1947 and remember Cold War duck-and-cover drills in school, put in place during the Korean War and missile race. I remember the shock in this country of Sputnik and the early failures of the NASA program that left Americans thinking the Russians were winning the Cold War. And then . . . along came a 23 year old, lanky, modest Texan who showed the Russians how Russian music should sound. And it was done in the first Tchaikovsky piano competition in 1958, a competition established by the Russians to show their superiority in the arts.

Van Cliburn was trained by Russian emigres at the Juilliard during the 1950s. He learned the Russian powerful style of dramatic piano and mastered it blending it with exquisite timing bringing and emotional bouquet to his playing. Better than the Russians, who, according to the book, were playing more mechanically than the emotional renditions of Cliburn.

When he played Rachmaninoff's 3rd Piano Concerto in the finals of the 1958 Tchaikovskyy competition in Moscow with Khruschev in the audience, he became the first to pubically play the more difficult version of the piece, thereby introducing one of the most difficult and beautiful piano concertos to a Russian audience as none had never heard it before. Not even Rachmoninoff played that more difficult version in his concert recordings, which is probably why his early recordings of the piece are shorter than Cliburns,

Enjoy listening to the book. Then listen to the piece being described on Utube with Cliburn playing. Especially listen to the recording of the Rachmaninoff's 3rd Piano concerto from the 1958 competition. It is available through I-Tunes. And then listen to the narrative of what was going on in the audience, in the judges booth, on the stage.

I Expected Better

As a professional musician from Texas, I was very interested in the subject of this book, Van Cliburn. While the focus of the book is the Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958, the book provides a full biography of Van both before and after his earth-shattering win in Moscow. I must admit, however, that this book delves into details that I was less interested in: the bios of Van’s competitors, what the ambassador’s daughter ate at a reception in Moscow, etc. Others may be more interested in this level of detail. But what completely ruined this book for me was the narrator. Perhaps he was selected for this recording because of his ability to pronounce Russian names, but his other talents weren’t suited to this book. First, he has an extremely, almost unnaturally, low voice. I found this quite distracting, especially since most of the book centers on Van’s youth. I would have liked a higher, younger voice. I also thought his Texas accents were horrible, and his attempts to mimic historical figures fell flat. Other national accents fared no better and were inconsistent. The narrator had a bad habit of building to a point in a paragraph, then immediately segueing into the next paragraph without pause. This confused me, as the subject of the next sentence was unclear. Quotes frequently were not set off from the author’s commentary, so that I couldn’t tell what was quote from what was opinion. But the most unforgivable sin of this narrator was his mispronunciations of the names of historical figures. “Wreck-It-Ralph” Vaughn Williams and “Lang Lang” (take a guess) were bad enough, but Leonard Bern-STEEN was mentioned about twenty times, causing me to grind my teeth. In 2017, with all that has been written about how Bernstein changed the pronunciation of his name, with interviews and television appearances available, and within the living memory of those who knew him, making a professional recording and not using the correct pronunciation of Bern-STINE is unpardonable.