Legendary pianist Vladimir Horowitz premieres 'Rach Third' with surprising Minnesota connections

The American tours of Russian composer and pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff included seven engagements with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. Nearly all of these concerts included performances of the composer’s work with Rachmaninoff himself at the piano. Rachmaninoff’s programs featured the Minneapolis premieres of his First Piano Concerto in 1938 and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in 1935. On four occasions — including his first and last visits to Minneapolis in 1920 and 1942 — Rachmaninoff performed his Second Piano Concerto, which appears on the opening concerts of the Minnesota Orchestra’s 2024-25 season this weekend with pianist Yunchan Lim as soloist.

Although Rachmaninoff would express interest in performing his monumental Third Piano Concerto (1909) in Minneapolis, the opportunity never materialized. Luckily, the local premiere of the work would be in the hands of Vladimir Horowitz, whose connection to the piece figures into his legendary status as one of the great pianists of the 20th century.

By the time of his March 10, 1933, performance with conductor Eugene Ormandy at Northrop Auditorium, Horowitz had already made the first recording of Rachmaninoff’s Third in 1930 with Albert Coates and the London Symphony Orchestra. (Rare silent movie footage [below] made during that visit shows Ormandy picking up Horowitz at the 510 Groveland Hotel in Minneapolis — probably shot by Ormandy’s wife, Stephanie — and then — perhaps shot by Ormandy himself — shows Horowitz with others at the back door to Northrop Auditorium. The woman on the left is then-Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra manager Carlyle Scott, who probably booked Horowitz for solo recitals when she oversaw the University of Minnesota's visiting artist concert series before she became the orchestra’s manager.)

Two years before, Horowitz’s memorable first meeting with Rachmaninoff in the basement of Steinway & Sons in New York had been arranged so that he could play through the concerto for the composer, who performed the orchestral part on a second piano. Horowitz biographer Glenn Plaskin’s account of the occasion describes Rachmaninoff as typically reserved except to make a few interpretive suggestions to the younger pianist. Later, Rachmaninoff would tell friends that Horowitz had swallowed the score whole, pouncing “with the fury and voraciousness of a tiger.” Decades before Van Cliburn’s sublime traversal of the Rachmaninoff Third in Moscow and Lim’s jaw-dropping performance of the concerto at the 2022 Van Cliburn Competition, Horowitz was the great champion of this now widely-known work, which is regarded by pianists as one of the most technically and emotionally demanding in the literature.

At the time of his meeting with Rachmaninoff, Horowitz had already been playing the Third Concerto for nearly a decade, having first studied the piece with Sergei Tarnowsky, who was his teacher at the Kiev Conservatory from 12 to 16. Plaskin regards Tarnowsky as “the most decisive influence in the formation of Volodya’s [Horowitz’s] pianism.” Horowitz’s friend and biographer David Dubal also has commented that “without his [Tarnowsky’s] psychological insight, Horowitz’s pianistic gift might have perished.”

Regarding the Rachmaninoff Third, which is the last piece Horowitz studied with Tarnowsky, Plaskin remarks that Tarnowsky “sculpted every phrase with his student, laying the groundwork for an interpretation that would someday astound audiences.”

There is a surprising Minnesota connection to Tarnowsky through the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, where he taught from 1934 to 1937. Tarnowsky had moved to the United States in 1930, teaching briefly at the Bush Conservatory in Chicago, where Sister Martina Hughes — a future prioress of St. Scholastica Monastery and college president at St. Scholastica — was a graduate. According to articles from St. Scholastica’s student newspaper, the Scriptorium, Tarnowsky gave private lessons and master classes during his time at the all-women’s college. (St. Scholastica became co-ed in 1969.) He gave a private performance in early 1935 for the Monocle Club — the college’s social and literary society. The pianist also made at least one public appearance as a performer when he presented a recital on Feb. 1, 1935, at the downtown Hotel Duluth.

Duluth must have seemed a remote place for Tarnowsky, who had achieved impressive successes as a pianist and teacher before going to St. Scholastica. He was awarded the Anton Rubinstein Prize when he graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1907. His tours of Europe included an engagement with the Berlin Philharmonic and a performance of Rachmaninoff’s First Piano Concerto in Rome, which prompted a written note of congratulations from Cosima Wagner.

Tarnowsky taught at the Odessa Conservatory before he was appointed to the faculty of the Kiev Conservatory by Russian composer Reinhold Gliere. Tarnowsky’s lessons with the teenage Vladimir Horowitz were from 1914 to 1919. Horowitz’s talented sister Regina (Genya) also studied with Tarnowsky during this time. In 1928, Tarnowsky married the stepdaughter of another Russian composer, Alexander Glazunov. The two families moved to Paris in the late 1920s before Tarnowsky emigrated to Chicago in 1930.

Tarnowsky’s longest affiliation in the United States was with DePaul University in Chicago, where he taught from the early 1930s until his retirement in 1950. The pianist and his second wife, Maxine Matlavish, then moved to Los Angeles, where he continued to teach privately. His most well-known student from this time was outstanding Cuban-American pianist Horatio Guttierez — who, like Horowitz, studied with Tarnowsky during most of his teenage years. (Guttierez also would play Rachmaninoff — the Second Concerto rather than the Third — with the Minnesota Orchestra, in 1995.)

Several years before his death in 1976, Tarnowsky made a recording of piano miniatures, Vignettes of Old Russia, which is admired by pianophiles for its evocative performances of rarely played works.

A January 2000 article in Clavier magazine indicates that, just a few weeks before his death, Tarnowsky was able to attend a Los Angeles recital by his old student Horowitz. Although there had been some tension between the two men over the years, which was due, in part, to Tarnowsky’s willingness to freely impart criticism to his famous pupil, there appears to have been a poignant meeting a day before the recital. During their conversation, which quickly drifted to Russian, Horowitz remarked with great emotion that Tarnowsky was the last person alive who had known his family in Kiev.

After Tarnowsky’s death, Horowitz wrote to a friend of Tarnowsky, “I was desolated to receive your news that my old friend and teacher, Sergei Tarnowsky, passed away. I am happy that I was able to be reunited with him once more — after so many years. His last days, as you describe them, must be an inspiration to all of us, this indomitable man, this gentle soul.”

In a collection of Horowitz’s papers at Yale University, there is a charming musical souvenir of Tarnowsky and Horowitz’s friendship via a student piece, the etude-fantasie Les Vagues, which Horowitz dedicated to his teacher while both men were still living in Kiev. The work is very much in the style of Rachmaninoff, whom Horowitz once described as “the musical god of my youth.” Russian pianist Valery Kuleshov has studied the unpublished manuscript and made an excellent recording of the piece, which is included on his 2005 album, Hommage à Horowitz.

Brad Snelling is a librarian at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth. He also writes historical notes for Matinee Musicale, the city's classical music series, which has been presenting concerts since 1900.