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The love affair between Van and the Russians started sizzling when he appeared in the preliminary auditions—and never let up. Wooed by official Russia and by musicians, he was also pursued by adoring teenagers. Total strangers, men and women, hugged and kissed him in the street, flooded him with gifts, fan mail, flowers (one bouquet came from Mrs. Nikita Khrushchev). Women cried openly at his concerts; in Leningrad, where fans queued up for three days and nights to buy tickets, one fell out of her seat in a faint. When Moscow TV scheduled only the first half of Van's prizewinning performance, the advance protest from Muscovites was so furious that the station scheduled the whole recital, plus encores. Thereafter, in each of the four cities where Van played on his Russian tour, his performance was broadcast on local TV and radio. Russians by the millions have learned to spot Van's most distinctive trademark—his great shock of springy blond hair. (He tried unsuccessfully all during his Russian visit to slick it down with hair cream and train it down with a nylon stocking drawn over his head, tight as a bathing cap.)
Exaltation. The Russians dote on the image of agonized exaltation that Van presents at the keyboard. He usually stares before him, his head tilted back at a 45-degree angle, his body leaning far back from the keys. In lyric passages he shakes his head from side to side in a kind of slow frenzy at the grip of the music upon him. In the more fiery passages he crouches close over the keys, his face scowling, his elbows jutting far behind him, like the legs of a praying mantis. When the orchestra is playing alone, he eyes the conductor with mounting eagerness, works his shoulders, finally addresses himself to the piano with the gawky excitement of a colt.
His technical equipment is superb. The enormous hands cover a twelve-note span. He has a dazzling warmup technique of playing swift scales in octaves and tenths with his hands crossed, a trick that he says does wonders to develop the left hand. When a friend told him about big-handed Soviet Pianist Richter's trick of playing tenths and simultaneously playing thirds between thumb and forefinger, Van immediately duplicated it, commented, "Aw, that's not hard." He plays Rachmaninoff's Third Concerto with the cadenza that the pianist-composer rewrote for his own performances because it was too difficult.
But Van's artistry is the kind that begins where technique leaves off. His expressiveness ranges from ghostly sonorities and harplike trills to ringing double octaves that cleave the orchestra like a sword. He can shape passages with tension and excitement, turn the weariest warhorse into a spirited charger. He is not above rewriting, as in the chorale section of Chopin's C Sharp Minor Scherzo, where he fills out the harmonies with extra notes ("I think Chopin would forgive me").
Van takes a no-nonsense view of his own playing, grows rapturous when he thinks he is in form ("Faultless!"), but can be equally tough on himself when he thinks he is not ("Did you ever hear such lousy piano playing in your whole life?"). He can be equally hard on other players; e.g., he scorns Sergei Prokofiev's old recording of his own Third Concerto: "Sorry, but it's just not Russian."