Pianist Van Cliburn dies in US at 78

World-renowned pianist Van Cliburn died in the United States on Wednesday, February 27, at the age of 78. Local mass media reports say that he died in his home not far from Fort Worth, Texas, from bone cancer.

Van Cliburn was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1934 and began taking piano lessons at the age of three from his mother and gave his first solo concert with the Houston Symphony Orchestra at the age of 13. He achieved worldwide recognition in 1958 at the age of twenty-three, when he won the first quadrennial International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow, at the height of the Cold War.

Cliburn was 23 when he won the Moscow Tchaikovsky competition.  He preformed Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Source: Youtube.

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