©2016 by John LaTorre
I just finished watching “Horowitz in Moscow,” a DVD I
picked up at a Friends of the Library sale some months ago. It’s a recording of
Vladimir Horowitz’s concert in Moscow in 1986. It was his first visit to the
Soviet Union since he defected from there in 1925, at the age of twenty-three. In
the beginning of the film, he is speaking to his niece, who is seventy years
old. When he last saw her, she was nine.
But the core of the documentary is not the trip, but the
concert he gave to a sold-out crowd. He won over the crowd with a recital of
works from Scarlatti, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Schubert, Liszt, and Moszkowski.
The performance was spellbinding.
And it reminded me of when I saw Horowitz in concert myself,
at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. It must have been around 1969, and it
was all because my friend William B. Gross persuaded me to go. He told me that
he was planning to camp out in front of the ticket office, so that he could be
the first in line for tickets when they went on sale the next morning. He
wanted me to go with him, and I did. We stayed on the sidewalk all night,
taking turns at running for coffee at a nearby diner that was open at all
hours. We bought the tickets and went home, returning some months later for the
concert. It was the first concert of classical music that I had ever attended,
and it changed my life.
My family was not into classical music. The only exposure I
had to it was a set of twelve long-playing albums issued by the Reader’s Digest people. It was called A Festival of Light Classical Music and
consisted of a dozen records comprising most of the shorter mainstays if the
classical music repertoire. I listened to them all, because I had a crush on a
girl who said she liked classical music, and I figured that this was one way to
get on her radar. I was wrong about that, but listening to those records gave
me an acquaintance with the genre.
Bill Gross was an avid collector of classical music
recordings and publications. His apartment was filled with so many of them that
you couldn’t navigate from room to room unless you stuck to the paths he’d left
between the stacks of books and records. It wasn’t all classical music, though.
He had recordings of everything Tom Lehrer ever did, even the most obscure
albums that were never sold in this country. But it was his collection of piano
recordings that he pressed on me most. He himself was a talented pianist, but
he seldom touched the instrument once he realized that he would never give a
performance as good as the people he idolized: Artur Schnabel, Van Cliburn, Sergei
Rachmaninoff, Vladimir Horowitz, Artur Rubenstein, and a host of others whose
name I can’t recall now.
He loaned me those records, and I made tapes of them on my
Sony TC-200 tape deck. None of those tapes have survived the intervening years,
but they gave me my first real familiarity with classical piano music. From
there, my taste branched out to baroque music, mainly due to Bill’s affection
for the parodies of Peter Shickele, whose “P.D.Q. Bach” records were gaining
popularity among the college crowd. To really understand the parodies, you had
to be acquainted with the originals, which Bill was happy to provide me. My
exposure widened to Beethoven, Mozart, Franck, and Wagner—the latter due to
another friend of mine named Charles Karpuk, who once had me over to his place
to hear the entire Ring Cycle in one marathon sitting.
I lost track of Bill eventually. I’d given him a car to
sell, an Oldsmobile F-85 given to me by my father. I signed the title over to
him, but I don’t know if he never sold it, because I never got a dime from him.
When I moved away from the Baltimore area in 1978, I pretty much gave up any
hope of seeing Bill or the money again.
But I’m not angry. Bill gave me more than the car would ever
be worth. He gave me an exposure to classical music that I never would have had
otherwise. When I saw Horowitz in concert, I became so enraptured with
Horowitz’s magical performance that I found myself leaning far over the rail of
the balcony. And I got a taste of that again as I saw Horowitz performing in
Moscow before an audience that was as transported as I was by his genius.
I wish I knew where you were now, Bill, so that I can thank
you properly. You had so many things to share with me besides classical music.
You were a skilled auto mechanic, and you gave me a taste of what that was all
about by helping me work on my cars, and letting me work on yours. When I
bought my copy of John Muir’s How to Keep
Your Volkswagen Alive, I remember you chortling over Muir’s description of
some of the definitely non-standard repair procedures Muir was describing. An
expert audiophile, you also counseled me on what stereo components to buy, and
how much I should spend on them, and how to get the best use of them.
And I remember the hours we spent in the basement of the
freshman dormitory at the Johns Hopkins University, where the studios of WJHU
were located. At the time, WJHU was just a “carrier current” radio station
whose broadcast range didn’t extend past the dormitory complex. It was for
hobbyists, and hobbyists we were. I was doing mostly engineering, minding the
sound levels and cuing up records on request, and you were the one keeping the equipment
humming so that we could stay on the air. And Karpuk was there, too, reading
H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe in a sepulchral voice in the wee hours of
the morning.
I’ve had some luck using the Internet to track down old
friends, but none at all with Bill. I found out that his sister had died, and
that his brother sold the family home many years ago. But Bill seems to have
left no traces on the World Wide Web. Maybe he finally got a degree in some
sort of engineering science, which was his ostensible reason for being at Johns
Hopkins. Or maybe he decided to make automobile repair his full-time job. Or maybe
the problems he had with a back injury put an end to those dreams, and he found
a way to parlay his extensive knowledge of classical music into a profitable
career. He could have done any of those things. Or maybe, restless spirit that
he was, he found other things, or was forced into other things, that steered
his destiny into a path that neither of us could foresee.
But for what you’ve done for me, I thank you, Bill. I owe
you one.
