VLADIMIR HOROWITZ LEFT RUSSIA IN 1925. HE CAME BACK 61 YEARS LATER — AT 82 YEARS OLD — TO SIT AT A PIANO IN MOSCOW. Only 400 of the 1,800 tickets went to ordinary people. The rest were reserved for Soviet officials and diplomats who probably couldn’t tell Chopin from Tchaikovsky. But then about 200 Conservatory students broke through the police lines, rushed past security, and packed the balcony walls and aisles. You can actually hear them storming in on the recording. Horowitz walked out in a blue suit and bow tie, slightly stooped. He shrugged. He waved. He smiled like he wasn’t sure this was real. Then he sat down. He had shipped his personal Steinway — the same one from his Manhattan townhouse — all the way to Moscow. He wouldn’t let anyone touch it except one technician, Franz Mohr, who had tuned it for 24 years. Two days before, at a rehearsal for students, people wept openly. A young soldier named Yuri, about to be deployed to Afghanistan, told a reporter he’d carry this memory with him always. When the concert ended, the audience stood for eight minutes straight. What Horowitz whispered to his wife Wanda backstage — about a sound he heard in the applause that reminded him of something from 1925 — that detail only surfaced years later in a conversation almost nobody recorded.
Vladimir Horowitz Returned to Moscow After 61 Years, and the City Never Forgot the Night In the fall of 1986,…