Horowitz’s recording of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto

Horowitz’s recording of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto is the disc Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov selects from a portable phonograph left for him by Richard Vanderwhile. Played in the attic at the end of a night of upheaval, it brings the recorded performance of a Russian pianist at Carnegie Hall into the Count’s private room. The music’s movement—from audience sounds and silence to applause, trumpets, and swelling strings—makes the disc more than a named object: it becomes a material link between the Count’s Russian past and a performance heard by an American audience.

Identity and Physical Form

The recording is identified by the label at the center of a disc found in a brown paper sleeve. It captures Vladimir Horowitz playing Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto at Carnegie Hall in New York. The evidence distinguishes the record from the portable phonograph that plays it: the phonograph is the case Richard leaves, while the recording is the particular disc the Count chooses from the small stack inside it.

The disc arrives in a black leather case about a foot square and six inches high, fitted with a leather handle and chrome clasps. Richard’s note directs the Count to pay special attention to the uppermost sleeve, which is where the Carnegie Hall recording is found. In the case’s rear compartment, the electrical cord is folded away. The arrangement makes the gift immediately usable: the Count can remove the record, connect the player to a wall socket, set the disc on the turntable, and lower the needle without needing to search for another component.

Gift and First Listening

The record’s first appearance follows a moment of private release. Back in the attic, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov picks up his father’s copy of Montaigne’s Essays, sits on Sofia’s bed, and weeps—not from grief, but from a sense of extraordinary good fortune. After he has calmed, he notices the case left on Grand Duke Demidov’s desk. Richard’s note, addressed to the Count, recalls their meeting that night and says he is going home for a time; it presents the phonograph as something the Count might find useful and singles out the top sleeve as especially apt to their conversation.

The object therefore reaches the Count not through a public ceremony but as a carefully considered personal gift, accompanied by a written explanation of where to look. The Count follows that instruction, opens the case, and chooses the uppermost disc. He then unfolds the cord, plugs in the player, removes the record from its sleeve, places it on the turntable, switches on the machine, and cues the needle. Each practical action carries the scene from the discovery of a sealed case to the beginning of an audible performance.

The Recorded Performance

The first sounds are not the concerto itself. The Count hears muted voices, a few coughs, and the last rustling of an audience settling into place. These noises give way to silence, then to heartfelt applause, as though the performer has just appeared on stage. The record preserves not only music but also the performance’s public setting: the listeners’ presence is audible before Horowitz begins.

The Count holds his breath. When the trumpets sound their first martial notes, strings swell, and Horowitz begins to play, the narration follows the music through images of Russia: a wolf moving among birches, wind across the steppe, candlelight in a ballroom, and a cannon at Borodino. The concerto is heard as music capable of evoking landscapes, intimate interiors, and national history in succession. Those images belong to the narrated experience of the performance; they are not a description of further events on the disc. The scene leaves the Count listening as the music unfolds, without stating how the recording ends or what he does afterward.

History and Significance

The record’s performer already belongs to the Count’s memory. Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov had seen Horowitz play in Moscow in 1921. Less than four years later, Horowitz traveled to Berlin for an official concert with a wad of foreign currency tucked in his shoes. The book places that recollection beside a recording made at Carnegie Hall, establishing a route from the Count’s remembered Moscow encounter to Horowitz’s later performance in New York without specifying when the disc itself was recorded or how it reached Richard.

That route gives the disc its particular force. A performance made for an audience across the Atlantic is carried into a room in the Metropol, where the Count hears his countryman’s playing accompanied by sounds of the distant concert hall. The music’s imagined Russian scenes coexist with the concrete evidence of its international setting: applause, a New York venue, and a recording that can be replayed privately. The record thus gathers public performance and solitary listening into one object. Its significance lies not in a stated change to the Count’s circumstances, but in the scene’s precise juxtaposition of physical distance with the intimate return of a familiar musical world.