Vladimir of Kiev

Lateness of season is no business handicap to Vladimir Horowitz, the greatest box-office pianist of the day. Last week this sallow, dynamic son-in-law of Arturo Toscanini closed his season with a hot-weather recital in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall. Critics found his playing below his usual brilliant standards. But the box office took in a fat $6,000.

Vladimir Horowitz owes his enormous following to the most amazingly fleet, powerful and accurate fingers in the pianistic world. He can trill with the relentless evenness of a mechanical drill. He can rip off a scale of octaves with a glittering finish that few of his contemporaries can even approach. His performances invariably crackle with electric virtuosity.

Few connoisseurs of piano music would place Pianist Horowitz with the top-rank interpretive artists such as Artur Schnabel, Artur Rubinstein, or Walter Gieseking. But in everything involving sheer, crystalline dexterity, Vladimir Horowitz tops every one of them. Son of a Kiev electrical engineer, nephew of a Russian music critic, Vladimir Horowitz gave his first concerts during the dog days of the Russian revolution. He was sometimes paid in butter, flour and cabbages.

Fifteen years ago, following a meteoric success in continental Europe, he arrived in the U.S., where he was introduced with the New York Philharmonic under Sir Thomas Beecham. So fast and furious was Horowitz' performance of the Tchaikovsky Concerto that peppery Sir Thomas refused to keep up with it. For whole measures, Tchaikovsky's music sounded like a tug of war.

Horowitz has been able to achieve much more rapport with his great father-in-law. Toscanini has given him brilliant support in two of the most bravura concerto recordings ever made: the Tchaikovsky Concerto (a fabulous best-seller), and the B Flat Major Concerto of Brahms.

Horowitz' virtuosity is sustained by a hair-trigger temperament. He approaches concerts in a state of panic, achieves relative calm only when his spring-steel fingers are actually at work. So serious did his nervousness become in 1935 that he gave up playing publicly for two years. Yet from the audience, Horowitz seems as coldly efficient as one of his arpeggios.

He lives a methodical if jittery life, alternating between a suite in a midtown Manhattan hotel and rented villas in Hollywood. He has a high giggle, a flamboyant taste for red ties and pink-striped shirts. Horowitz' great absorption outside music is his magnificent collection of snuffboxes assembled from over the world. He keeps them in a large chest of drawers, laid out with geometrical precision on a lining of green silk.

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