Van Cliburn died today.  I remember as a kid being confused because he didn’t seem to have a first name; the only other “van” I knew was Ludwig van Beethoven.

Here he is in Moscow back in 1962 playing the leave-no-prisoners finale of Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto with Kiril Kondrashin and the RCA Symphony.  (He won the Tchaikovsky Competition four years earlier.)  We get a glimpse of Nikita Khrushchev applauding from a box at the end.