Reply #10: Van Cliburn played here last year at age 72!

[Sancho]

I couldn't believe it. He was amazing.


http://www.sptimes.com/2006/09/24/news_pf/Floridian/His_life_s_work.shtml

Pianist Van Cliburn returns to Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 yet again, this time with the Florida Orchestra.

By JOHN FLEMING
Published September 24, 2006

Van Cliburn and Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 go back a long way.

"When I made my debut with the Houston Symphony when I was 12, I played the Tchaikovsky, and when I made my New York Philharmonic debut, it was the Tchaikovsky," Cliburn said in a recent phone interview. "I always smile to myself when I think how that piece has sort of been with me all my life."

It was the Tchaikovsky, of course, that Cliburn played in 1958 to win the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. At 23, the tall, lanky Texan became an instant icon, an American hero through his triumph at the peak of the Cold War, six months after the Soviet Union's launch of the first Sputnik satellite. The pianist came home from the competition to a ticker-tape parade in New York and a meeting with Dwight D. Eisenhower at the White House. He remains America's most famous, beloved classical musician, both for his career and the international piano competition that bears his name.

Now Cliburn will play the concerto again in a concert Monday night with the Florida Orchestra at Mahaffey Theater. The engagement was originally scheduled for last spring to mark the orchestra's return to the St. Petersburg hall after a nearly yearlong renovation, but delays in the reopening of the venue pushed the concert back. Monday's performance will be the first of the orchestra's 2006-07 season.