Rachmaninoff and Horowitz

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Rachmaninoff and Horowitz

Published: 05 Dec. 2025, 00:05

Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

Na Sung-in

The author is a music critic and director of the classical music brand Poongwoldang.

On Jan. 8, 1978, Carnegie Hall hosted a special performance marking the 50th anniversary of Vladimir Horowitz’s American debut. The program featured Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, a work feared even by young virtuosos for its scale and difficulty. Horowitz was 75. Many wondered whether he was taking on too much. Yet he pressed ahead, driven by what Rachmaninoff had meant to him throughout his artistic life.

Fifty years earlier, on Jan. 12, 1928, the 25-year-old Horowitz had astonished New York in a Carnegie Hall performance with the New York Philharmonic under Sir Thomas Beecham, playing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Rachmaninoff was in the audience. Later, he offered a characteristically blunt reaction: Horowitz’s octaves were “fast and loud, but not very musical.” Still, Rachmaninoff sensed the young pianist’s urgency. Horowitz could no longer return to his homeland. Every appearance was a chance to secure a future in exile. Rachmaninoff, himself a displaced Russian musician, responded with generosity and drew the young man close.

Pianist Lim Yun-chan, left, and conductor Klaus Mäkelä greet the audience after their performance at the JoongAng Ilbo 60th anniversary concert held at the Seoul Arts Center Concert Hall on June 10. [KIM JONG-HO]

Horowitz never forgot it. In private settings, he and Rachmaninoff played four-hand arrangements of the Third Concerto. Those moments left Horowitz deeply moved by the composer’s character and artistic vision. That bond lent the 1978 anniversary performance a meaning far beyond technical achievement.

By then, Horowitz’s hands no longer possessed the explosive power of earlier decades. The torrents of sound and blistering tempo that once defined his playing had softened. What remained was something different: an intimacy shaped by respect and memory. The music carried the weight of their shared past, creating a nostalgia no technical brilliance alone could produce. One imagines that had Rachmaninoff heard this performance, he would have breathed with the phrasing, shared in the joy and regret and eventually offered one of his rare, full smiles as if to say, “Now it is musical.”

Lim Yun-chan, who became the youngest winner of the Van Cliburn Competition in 2022 and rose to global prominence for his poetic interpretations, had not yet been born in 1978. Still, he has said he listened to the recording “a thousand times,” absorbing Rachmaninoff’s world through Horowitz. Musicality beyond technique opens into an expansive realm. Listeners return to such performances because encounters shaped by exile, friendship, and memory remain alive in the sound.

This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.