Evenings with Horowitz: A Personal Portrait
David Dubal
Vladimir Horowitz (1903-1989) was the Merlin of the keyboard. His name spelled keyboard virtuosity for 65 years of our century. Not since Liszt and Paderewski has any pianist created such a legend. When he condescended to perform, lines formed days in advance. The highest paid concert artist in history, Horowitz won twenty-three Grammy Awards and sold more records than any other classical artist. Horowitz set unique standards of artistry; to be compared with him is every young pianist’s dream.
Yet the real man was an enigma. For years, he would mysteriously dissapear from the concert stage. What he thought, what he did, was unknown.
Evenings With Horowitz details a special friendship between two musicians. The author, David Dubal, first came into Horowitz’s life when they collaborated on a series of radio interviews which won the coveted Peabody Award. Later, Dubal became a weekly guest at the Horowitz home.
The book is a vivid account of their mutual passion for music and the piano. It reflects the struggles and triumphs of the Maestro, a flaming genius who was also insecure and fearful of old age and the loss of his powers. Though a man both tortured and isolated in his last years, he traveled the globe in a succession of unprecedented music triumphs – from Moscow to Tokyo. In this entertaining and accessable memoir, Dubal is seen prodding Horowitz on, offereing him new ideas, delighting him with stories of the great composers, pampering him, disagreeing with him, bringing young pianists to learn from him, and always sitting in amazement when Horowitz played for him.
Evenings with Horowitz covers a lifetime of musical wisdom and contains countless anecdotes of the musical world. Horowitz discusses his friendship and rivalry with Arthur Rubinstein, his love for the great Rachmaninoff, his esteem for the noble Paderewski, and his respect for his father-in-law, Artuto Toscanini. For fifty-six years, Horowitz was married to the iron-willed and formidable Wanda Toscanini.
Horowitz reveals the agony and the ecstasy of a pianist’s career, his love and awe for the great composers whose music he played. Dubal supplies the reader with critical appraisals of Horowitz as well as an invaluable discography highlighting Horowitz’s greatest recordings.
1-57467-086-7, 348 pp, 47 b/w photographs, includes a 75 minute CD, 6 x 9", paperback, © 1991, 2003
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