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Pattern. The dwindling demand for Van's talents also followed a pattern familiar to other young instrumentalists: one big prizewinning season followed by relative obscurity. Most musicians blame the concert-management system for this state of affairs far more than they do the public. Between them, Columbia Artists Management, the National Artists Corporation and Impresario Sol Hurok control 90% of the soloists and instrumental groups touring the country. To the beginning artist, the Big Three offer irresistible bait: a chance to tour the country for pay and to build a reputation. But the reputations are built in New York, and the pay, when fees and traveling expenses are deducted, usually amounts to only several hundred dollars. An artist caught in the community-concert treadmill usually deserts the field after a few years or is nudged out by management on the theory that the public wants new faces.
Van was shocked by the hard facts of community concert life. His net income dropped to less than $3,000 a year (from a high of $8,000). He piled up $7,000 of debts, mostly loans that his parents made for him from the Kilgore National Bank. He took to such money-saving devices as playing classical music for his supper in Manhattan's Asti Restaurant.
While in Kilgore last fall, drilling scales into his mother's pupils, Van got a letter from Mme. Lhevinne suggesting that he enter the Moscow competition. He wavered awhile; his managers at Columbia Artists were cool to the idea, wanted him to go instead on a speculative, pay-your-way tour of Europe. But everybody he talked to thought he would win, and his eyes shone with the notion of taking the gold medal in Rachmaninoff's Moscow.
Victory. For two months, from the time he was accepted until he left for Moscow, Van shut himself away in his tiny Manhattan apartment on 57th Street across from Carnegie Hall and spent six to eight hours a day at his quilt-covered Steinway practicing the staggering repertory each entrant was expected to master. Plagued with colitis, he dutifully went in for dieting and rigorous physical conditioning, boosted his strength with massive doses of vitamins and six packages of Knox gelatin a day. Sundays he checked his progress with Mme. Lhevinne, or gave small private recitals for groups of friends. When he left for Moscow, his phone bill was unpaid and his Columbia Artists contract was running out, with no talk of a renewal.