American pianist Harvey Lavan Cliburn (1934 – 2013), better known simply as Van Cliburn, is a legend in the history of the piano. His name is today strongly tied to the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, which takes place in Texas every four years (www.cliburn.org), but his fame is due to an historical event, happened in 1958, when Van Cliburn won the first prize at the first Edition of the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. American musicologist Stuart Isacoff, guest of Cremona Mondomusica 2014, is going to release a new book: “When the World Stopped to Listen: Van Cliburn’s Moscow Triumph and its Aftermath”, focussed on this particular event and its political and artistic aftermaths. In a recent interview published on the San Francisco Classical Voice, Mr. Isacoff explains that Van Cliburn’s triumph in Moscow had an immense media exposure in US and internationally: this new competition was intended to be a demonstration of Soviet cultural muscle, and a filigree to go along with the launch of Sputnik-1 a year earlier. The jury included an all-star team composed of Dmitri Shostakovich, Emil Gilels, Sviatoslav Richter, Dimitry Kabalevsky, and Lev Oborin. The fact that the winner was an American should have been a difficult fact to accept for the Nationalist part of the Russian politburo. But Isacoff notes: “I think Khrushchev thought, ‘who knows?’,” said Isacoff. “‘Maybe this will make a difference, maybe this will calm things down.’ This was at a point when the Russian economy badly needed a boost in trade and tourism. So when this kid shows up and plays the piano like no one has heard before, the Soviets decided to tip their hats and send a message to acknowledge his talent, but also to convey a gesture of generosity.”
(http://www.sfcv.org/article/van-cliburn-and-the-cruelty-of-the-piano)