Vladimir Horowitz: The 1982 Royal Festival Hall recitalBBC Music magazineOne spring Saturday in May 1982, remembered by witnesses as if yesterday, the most famous living pianist gave his first recital in Europe for 31 years. Vladimir Horowitz had been acclaimed as a phenomenon when he escaped Communist Russia, aged 22, in 1925. A pianist with a pinpoint tone and a technique before which Rachmaninov himself paled, he conquered the world’s concert halls, married Toscanini’s daughter and was lavishly wooed by record labels.No one, however, owned Vladimir Horowitz. His sensibility was so particular that he never rose before lunchtime, ate steamed fish, and played recitals only at four in the afternoon. His long absence from Europe was due to periods of mental instability and hospitalisation. Few who attended the RFH in May 1982 had ever heard him live before.The release of that recital, as the cover-mount of BBC Music magazine’s September issue, is momentous. The opening notes of a Scarlatti sonata demonstrate that this was a pianist who interpreted music from within a bubble of impermeable subjectivity, oblivious to precedent and expectation. Horowitz perceived no barrier between the early classicism of Scarlatti and Scriabin’s crackpot modernism: both were music to his soul. He played Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood with an infant-like innocence and Rachmaninov’s second sonata with a profound, empathetic loneliness.The recorded sound, a shade indistinct, is no harsher than his New York studio sessions, and the remoteness of the applause underlines a perceptual distance between Horowitz and the rest of us. Only in his final DG recordings, taped in his own home, does Horowitz permit intimacy. No piano lover can afford to leave this disc unplayed.___Norman Lebrecht is a regular presenter on BBC Radio 3 and a contributor to the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and other publications. He has written 12 books about music, the most recent being Why Mahler? He hosts the blog Slipped Disc.