{"id":20309,"date":"2021-02-04T07:06:51","date_gmt":"2021-02-04T12:06:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/?p=20309"},"modified":"2021-02-04T07:08:52","modified_gmt":"2021-02-04T12:08:52","slug":"horowitz-in-russia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/?p=20309","title":{"rendered":"Horowitz in Russia"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In 1986, near the end of the Cold War, Vladimir Horowitz, then 82 years old, agreed to return to the Soviet Union for concerts in Moscow and Leningrad. The performance was recorded on video. PBS’ Great Performances draws on this historic video for the documentary “The Magic of Horowitz,” which was broadcast on Jan. 22. The program also is available for streaming, here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Concert videos are one of my favorite genres — often more entertaining than movies. But this one is extra special, because it’s an important little piece of Cold War history as well as a glimpse of Russian culture, as the camera frequently moves around the hall to catch the responses of the audience. They adored Horowitz. President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev arranged the concert, as the U.S. and Russia moved toward d\u00e9tente<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The camera often watches Horowitz’ hands on the keyboard. Musicians will want to take note of Horowitz’ unusual hand positions — wrists low, fingers often almost flat. This is not how pianists are taught to use their hands. At times, Horowitz’ hand positions look almost amateurish and awkward. One wonders how he did it.<\/p>\n

The documentary is narrated by Peter Gelb, who was Horowitz’ manager. Gelb has interesting stories about Horowitz’ personal peculiarities, such as what he ate, as well as Horowitz’ recovery from a dark period in which he never played in public.<\/p>\n

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In 1986, near the end of the Cold War, Vladimir Horowitz, then 82 years old, agreed to return to the Soviet Union for concerts in Moscow and Leningrad. The performance was recorded on video. PBS’ Great Performances draws on this historic video for the documentary “The Magic of Horowitz,” which was broadcast on Jan. 22. … Continue reading “Horowitz in Russia”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20309"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20320,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20309\/revisions\/20320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}