Biography (read more)
Vladimir Samoylovich Horowitz was born on 1 October 1903 in Kiev, then part of the Russian Empire, the youngest of four children of an assimilated Jewish family. He received his first piano lessons from his mother and entered the Kiev Conservatory in 1912, studying with Vladimir Puchalsky, Sergei Tarnowsky and Felix Blumenfeld, and gave his first solo recital in Kiev in 1920. He toured extensively in the early Soviet years, at times paid in food rather than money, and in December 1925 left for Germany with no intention of returning. He made his Western debut in Berlin that month and his American debut at Carnegie Hall on 12 January 1928, playing Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto under Thomas Beecham. He died in New York on 5 November 1989.
Horowitz is widely regarded as one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century, celebrated for an extraordinary virtuoso technique, a wide range of tone colour and the sheer excitement his playing generated in the concert hall. His career was punctuated by long withdrawals from public performance, and his 1965 return to Carnegie Hall after twelve years away became one of the most famous concert events of the century. He was closely identified with Scarlatti, Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff and Scriabin, whose music he had played for the composer as a boy, and with his own transcriptions and arrangements. His 1986 recital at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, his first appearance in Russia in sixty-one years, was broadcast worldwide, and he received more than twenty Grammy Awards over his career.
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