THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, December 23, 1995 TAG: 9512220062
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Larry Maddry
LENGTH: Long : 123 lines
THE 71-YEAR-OLD concert pianist lives alone in a drafty farmhouse surrounded by the yellowing likenesses of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart, which stare from wooden frames on the living room wall.
The Virginia Beach virtuoso has given thousands of performances in his lifetime. Now he plays most often for himself.
Sometimes, at 3 or 4 a.m., he rises from his bed. He foots his way down the hall to a Steinway piano in the living room.
On moonlit nights he can see beyond the piano top through the glass doors where a a broad sweep of the Lynnhaven River flows like liquid silver toward the sea.
The elderly man man plays sometimes until dawn, reliving in memory his extraordinary life.
His name is George Riabikoff.
Although hardly a household word, he is a pianist of rare accomplishment. And some believe him to be one of the greatest pianists of our time.
Those nocturnal concerts are often prompted by the savagery of his dreams.
``I sometimes wake with my brow soaked with sweat,'' he said.
He dreams, he says, of his Gestapo torturers from a half-century earlier who crushed his hands and drove spikes through his palms because he refused to tell where Jews were hiding. He was only 14 at the time.
``I can still feel the pain from those old wounds in my fingers as I play,'' he confided. ``But I didn't tell them where they were. The conditions were so horrible then that if they had killed me, it would have been a relief.''
Riabikoff, who claims descent from both Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky, was a child prodigy. Accepted at Russia's Kiev Conservatory at the age of 4, he was the youngest ever given that honor, he said.
After rescue from the Berlin Buch concentration camp by Allied troops, he and his mother fled to the United States in October of 1949. His father died, he says, at the hands of the Nazis.
He arrived as a teenager and came to the attention of the Gina Bachauer, one of America's greatest pianists.
Bachauer said of the prodigy: ``Of all the young pianists I have ever heard, I find that George Riabikoff has not only the best inborn musical talent, but also great poetry, imagination and temperament in his playing. . . a real and great artist.''
On a piano in Riabikoff's rented farmhouse are photographs of the great musicians he has known as friends. Among them are photographs of the pianist with Horowitz and Van Cliburn.
He has played at the White House for at least five U.S. presidents, including Kennedy and Johnson.
Kennedy he says, was the president he knew best. ``I played in the East Room for a small party,'' he recalled. ``I told the President I was going to play a Hungarian Rhapsody. He misunderstood and laughed. He thought I had said Hungarian raspberry.''
Riabikoff is a warm and affectionate man who, in his later years, still retains an old world charm and gracious manner.
Strikingly handsome in his youth, he won rave reviews for his performances in this country and abroad from the 1950s through the 1970s. During one of his concerts in Richmond, The Richmond Times-Dispatch critic described him as ``A pianist of the first rank. . . His playing perhaps exceeded any interpretation heard in recent years.''
And The Miami Herald said the pianist had the ``rare ability to convey muisc to the listener's heart that is essential to greatness in performance.''
While in Germany he was invited to play on Bach's organ, an honor he treasures.
Never married - ``I was always a mama's boy,'' he concedes - Riabikoff moved to Virginia Beach in 1989 from West Virginia, after his mother's death.
``I played at The Chrysler Museum. And then, later, at Tidewater Community College. My friends here said I should move to Hampton Roads. And I did.''
He has since played for students in elementary and middle schools here, receiving adulatory letters from the schools for his performances.
A letter from John Sutherland, principal of Kemps Landing Elementary School is typical: ``He held our students and staff spellbound.'' Why spend so much time with the young? ``I want to plant the seed of greatness in their souls,'' Riabikoff said. ``It pleases me to see their eyes sparkle when they behold a work of beauty.''
His last performance was at Sandhills Community College in North Carolina earlier this year.
M. McKellar Israel, the professor of piano in the school's Department of Fine Arts, described his concert at Sandhills as ``astounding.'' He calls Riabikoff one of the greatest artists of our time and one of unmatched technical proficiency. He believes no one living can perform the incredibly difficult Don Juan Fantasy by Liszt as well as Riabikoff. ``Riabikoff is a successor of history's great romantic pianists such as Liszt, Rachmaninov, Rubinstein and Horowitz,'' he declared.
An artist with such credentials should be living in modest comfort. But, according to friends, he has fallen on hard times.
Jack Rourke of Virginia Beach, an admirer and friend, said he was shocked when visiting the pianist to find the house so cold.
``At first he said there must be something wrong with the furnace. But I had to pull the fact that he didn't have money for oil out of him.'' Rourke says. Riabikoff receives a few hundred dollars a month form [from] Social Security but has supported himself by concerts and piano lessons.
Riabikoff had a major heart operation in September, Rourke said. ``That means he has not been able to earn the money to keep himself going.'' Rourke said the pianist has done so much for others he found it ``unfathomable'' that he should now need financial help.
An effort to help Riabikoff - and others like him - is being made by the United Jewish Federation of Norfolk. Mark Goldstein, the federation's executive vice-president, noted that the pianist was featured at the federation's Holocaust Rememberance Day several years ago.
``We have tried to assist Mr. Riabikoff in the past and it is an honor to do that now,'' he said. A Righteous Gentile Fund is being established by the federation that will benefit the pianist and other non-Jews who performed valorous acts in defense of Jews during the Holocaust.
Goldstein said contributions to the Righteous Gentile Fund can be mailed to The United Jewish Federation of Tidewater, 7300 Newport Ave., Norfolk, Virginia, 23505 ILLUSTRATION: Photos by Motoya Nakamura, The Virginian-Pilot
Photos on his Steinway ...
George Riabikoff, 71, has played for U.S. presidents, as well as for
local schoolchildren.
by CNB