Rubinstein at Carnegie Hall

This season Artur Rubinstein (aged 72) has been giving a series of ten recitals—all for charity, all at Carnegie Hall, all within forty days, all to a house that has been sold out for months—commemorating the fifty fifth anniversary of his American debut as an impassioned but rough-hewn pianist and the twenty-fourth anniversary of his American redebate, under the management of Sol Hurok, as a pianist who played all the notes.

“He was always sloppy when he played in the annual Chopin competition I sponsored at my villa in Warsaw,” said the exiled Baroness who tried to teach me Russian in 1950, “but when he married, his wife made him get down to work at the piano. He would have been nothing —nichevó—without her.” (When the baroness talked of piano playing, I paid attention: her cousin was Alexander Sziloti, the last and the greatest of the pupils of Franz Liszt, and her stories of going to concerts in the company of Sergei Rachmaninoff were legion—but we’re reviewing Rubinstein.)

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W. F. Rickenbacker

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This season Artur Rubinstein (aged 72) has been giving a series of ten recitals—all for charity, all at Carnegie Hall, all within forty days, all to a house that has been sold out for months—commemorating the fifty fifth anniversary of his American debut as an impassioned but rough-hewn pianist and the twenty-fourth anniversary of his American redebate, under the management of Sol Hurok, as a pianist who played all the notes.

“He was always sloppy when he played in the annual Chopin competition I sponsored at my villa in Warsaw,” said the exiled Baroness who tried to teach me Russian in 1950, “but when he married, his wife made him get down to work at the piano. He would have been nothing —nichevó—without her.” (When the baroness talked of piano playing, I paid attention: her cousin was Alexander Sziloti, the last and the greatest of the pupils of Franz Liszt, and her stories of going to concerts in the company of Sergei Rachmaninoff were legion—but we’re reviewing Rubinstein.)