Quotes from Stuart Isacoff

The Soviet performers felt that every note had to be strictly controlled. They had excellent training, but the result lacked freshness and poetry." That word, "freedom," was secretly on the lips of many. In that sense, Van's message became unintentionally political.

Those admirers created so strong a ballast against possible Kremlin tampering with the jury vote that it was said years later by critic Tamara Grum-Grzhimailo that the seeds of perestroika were first planted in this moment,

Though his rivals at the competition were well trained, there was something different about Van's art. For many in the audience it represented the face of freedom. Performing under the auspices of a repressive regime and before an intimidating jury of some of the world's greatest musicians, he seemed to answer to no authority other than the shifting tides of his own soul. The mere act of hearing him became liberating. When

Peterson revealed that he had decided the only way to get attention was "to frighten the hell out of everybody pianistically.

Alkan even wrote a piece for four feet, called Bombardo-Carillon, in which the player's legs are likely to get entangled during performance. (When Swiss-American pianist Rudolph Ganz was asked to perform Bombardo-Carillon with a female pianist, he declined on the grounds that he didn't know her well enough.)

The handful of leading craftsmen turning out pianos during that time produced only around thirty to fifty of them per annum. But by 1798, piano maker James Shudi Broadwood could barely keep up with demand, writing to a wholesaler, "Would to God we could make them like muffins!

As Victorian-era prudishness set in, some upstanding citizens also took to putting coverlets over the instrument's legs out of an exaggerated sense of modesty.

It was the kind of moment on which the wheels of history turn.

To the young among his admirers, he was the fresh face of an emerging, better world; to the old, a balm for the pain of lost youth and the bitterness of mortality—a bright spot in a dreary world still pulling itself up out of the gray muck of war.

Oscar is our Liszt and Bill Evans is our Chopin,