Van Cliburn

the remarkable life of the famed pianist

The brilliant pianist Van Cliburn became a global superstar when he won the first International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow, in 1958, as an American at the height of the Cold War. Cliburn didn’t tell his story in depth until the late 1980s, when he met Howard and decided to reflect, at length, on his remarkable life and career. “Van Cliburn” is the first work to reveal that the Soviets originally had rigged the competition in favor of a Russian pianist. But the Russian audience’s adoration of Cliburn forced a reversal, which had to be approved by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev.

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“Tells the lanky Texan’s life through interviews with musicians, including Mr. Cliburn. Mr. Reich … provides a service with this first biography since Abram Chasins’s out-of-print book ‘The Van Cliburn Legend,’ published in 1959.”

New York Times