In order to make him appear too young for military service so as not to risk damaging his hands, Samuil took a year off his son's age by claiming that he was born in 1904.

[citation needed] Horowitz soon began to tour Russia and the Soviet Union, where he was often paid with bread, butter and chocolate rather than money, due to the economic hardship caused by the Russian Civil War.

[14] In December 1925, Horowitz emigrated to Germany, ostensibly to study with Artur Schnabel in Berlin but secretly intending not to return.

In 1926, the Soviet Union selected Horowitz to join the delegation of pianists that were to represent the country at the I International Chopin Piano Competition in Poland in 1927, but he decided to remain in the West and did not participate.

Olin Downes, writing for The New York Times, was critical about the tug of war between conductor and soloist, but credited Horowitz with both a beautiful singing tone in the second movement and a tremendous technique in the finale, calling his playing a "tornado unleashed from the steppes".

In his review of Horowitz's solo recital, Downes characterized the pianist's playing as showing "most if not all the traits of a great interpreter.

[21] He made his television debut in a concert taped at Carnegie Hall on February 1, 1968, and broadcast nationwide by CBS on September 22 of that year.

Horowitz's first European-produced recording, made in 1930 by The Gramophone Company/HMV, RCA Victor's UK based affiliate, was of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No.

Through 1936, Horowitz continued to make recordings in the UK for HMV of solo piano repertoire, including his 1932 account of Liszt's Sonata in B minor.

In 1959, RCA Victor issued a live 1943 performance of the Tchaikovsky concerto with Horowitz and Toscanini; generally considered superior to the 1941 studio recording, it was selected for induction into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

During Horowitz's second retirement, which began in 1953, he made a series of recordings for RCA Victor in his New York City townhouse, including LPs of Scriabin and Clementi.

[23] Horowitz taught seven students between 1937 and 1962: Nico Kaufmann (1937),[24] Byron Janis (1944–1948), Gary Graffman (1953–1955), Coleman Blumfield (1956–1958), Ronald Turini (1957–1963), Alexander Fiorillo (1960–1962) and Ivan Davis (1961–1962).

"[32] Dubal felt that Horowitz sublimated a strong instinctual sexuality into a powerful erotic undercurrent communicated in his playing.

[8] His playing underwent a perceptible decline during this period,[8] with his 1983 performances in the United States and Japan marred by memory lapses and a loss of physical control.

[citation needed] Many critics, including Harold C. Schonberg and Richard Dyer, felt that his post-1985 performances and recordings were the best of his later years.

[citation needed] In 1986, Horowitz announced that he would return to the Soviet Union for the first time since 1925 to give recitals in Moscow and Leningrad.

This resulted in a number of Moscow Conservatory students crashing the concert,[43] which was audible to viewers of the internationally televised recital.

The concert was also widely seen on a Special Edition of CBS News Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt reporting from Moscow.

Later that year he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor bestowed by the United States, by President Ronald Reagan.

Many[48] consider Horowitz's first recording of the Liszt Sonata in B minor in 1932 to be the definitive reading of that piece, even after over 90 years and more than 100 performances committed to disc by other pianists.

[50] During World War II, Horowitz championed contemporary Russian music, giving the American premieres of Prokofiev's Piano Sonatas Nos.

[8] Horowitz's transcriptions of note include his composition Variations on a Theme from Carmen and The Stars and Stripes Forever by John Philip Sousa.

Transcriptions aside, Horowitz was not opposed to altering the text of compositions to improve what he considered "unpianistic" writing or structural clumsiness.

In 1940, with the composer's consent, Horowitz created his own performance edition of Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Sonata from the 1913 original and 1931 revised versions, which pianists including Ruth Laredo and Hélène Grimaud[51] have used.

Horowitz also altered short passages in some works, such as substituting interlocking octaves for chromatic scales in Chopin's Scherzo in B minor.

Virgil Thomson was consistently critical of Horowitz as a "master of distortion and exaggeration" in his reviews appearing in the New York Herald Tribune.

[55] Horowitz's style frequently involved vast dynamic contrasts, with overwhelming double-fortissimos followed by sudden delicate pianissimos.

He elicited an exceptionally wide range of tonal color, and his taut, precise attack was noticeable even in his renditions of technically undemanding pieces such as the Chopin Mazurkas.

"[8] Music critic and biographer Harvey Sachs submitted that Horowitz may have been "the beneficiary—and perhaps also the victim—of an extraordinary central nervous system and an equally great sensitivity to tone color.

"[56] Oscar Levant, in his book The Memoirs of an Amnesiac, wrote that Horowitz's octaves were "brilliant, accurate and etched out like bullets."