Cliburn, Casals credited with fine week for culture

Music lovers in Pittsburgh had opportunities to hear both a rising star and a master artist when Van Cliburn and Pablo Casals performed here during the same week 50 years ago.

Mr. Cliburn, 30, was piano soloist and conducted the Pittsburgh Symphony in a benefit concert for the musicians’ pension fund on April 20, 1965. The audience of 2,000 for his performance filled Syria Mosque in Oakland.

Post-Gazette music critic Donald Steinfirst praised Mr. Cliburn’s Pittsburgh debut as a conductor and soloist in Sergei Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto.

“The young artist seemed to have no difficulty in communicating his wishes to the orchestra,” he wrote in a story that appeared April 21. “[And] since the Pittsburgh Symphony is a particularly flexible instrument, it responded nobly and gave the conductor fine support.”

Mr. Cliburn woke up internationally famous after he won the First International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow in 1958. He went on to have a long career as a soloist and recording artist. Although he took periodic breaks from performing, he continued to play until shortly before his death in 2013 at age 78.

Mr. Casals, world renowned as a cellist, was 88 when he came to Pittsburgh to conduct two programs of music by Bach, including all the Brandenburg Concertos.

“It was a momentous and breath-taking evening of music making from the moment the diminutive, wiry conductor lifted his baton,” Mr. Steinfirst wrote on April 23, the day after the first concert at Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland. Mr. Casals’ orchestra for both programs comprised members of the Pittsburgh Symphony, joined by faculty and students from the music department at Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University.

“Casals’ direction must be seen as well as heard,” the story said. “He was supposed to conduct from a seated position but the excitement of a phrase, the upsurge of a crescendo or the neat realization of a cadence brought him to his feet time and again.

“He sings a bit here and there, and he is not above stamping his foot to bring an errant musician into the strict tempi he employs,” Mr. Steinfirst wrote.

His concerts in Pittsburgh by no means marked the end of Mr. Casals’ long career. He continued to give master classes and to conduct until shortly before his death at 96 in 1973.