We mark the solo piano recital on April 20, 1986 – 34 years ago today – that saw Vladimir Horowitz perform at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. Horowitz, who was 82 years old at the time, had not visited or performed in his native Russia for 61 years. Not since Franz Liszt (1811-1886) had a pianist routinely electrified audiences as did Horowitz (1903-1989). It wasn’t just his flawless technique: the amazing colors he could draw from the piano; the preternatural accuracy and clarity of his playing; the ungodly speed of his octaves and the overwhelming volume of sound he could produce without ever banging. It was also the prodigious electricity – the sheer excitement – he generated on stage, what the senior music critic of The New York Times Harold Schonberg called: “a kind of high-voltage charisma that, in his time, could be matched only by Toscanini, Callas, and Pavarotti.”  The American pianist Emanuel Ax said:  “I knew people who worshiped Horowitz, as I did, and I knew people who hated him. But no one was indifferent. He brought the idea of excitement in piano playing to a higher pitch than anyone I’ve ever heard. For me the […]