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...Iturbi has been in the U.S. since 1929, has worked hard to get into big-league conducting (Ford Sunday Evening Hour, Eastman Rochester Symphony). One of his stunts has been to conduct from the keyboard, while playing a Liszt or Beethoven concerto. He enjoys periodic crescendos of rage (against jazz, hot dogs, flash bulbs, etc.), makes a point of being nearly late at concerts. He plays a Baldwin piano, and wherever he goes he is attended by a sort of caddy, supplied by the Baldwin people to look after the piano, piano stool, pianist. Plaintively the caddy says...
Such, or thereabouts, is Artur Rubinstein, Polish prodigy who has been a professional pianist for 42 of his 53 years. He is now on a 25-week tour. For pianistic form and box-office appeal, Rubinstein rates with the best of them-polished Josef Hofmann (56 years at the keyboard); titanic Sergei Rachmaninoff; glittering Vladimir Horowitz; sober Artur Schnabel; suave Walter Gieseking (now in Switzerland); rippling-fingered Moriz Rosenthal, 79-year-old pupil of Liszt...
Artur Rubinstein is no kin to Russia's late Pianist Anton Rubinstein, one of the greatest of all time. Irritated at being continually asked whether they were related, he once bought a cap labeled "No." To Artur Rubinstein are dedicated the two toughest keyboard workouts of all time: 1) Stravinsky's "Sonata" from his ballet score Petrouchka; 2) Rudepoema, a ferocious tonal portrait of Rubinstein by Brazilian Heitor Villa-Lobos, whom the pianist helped launch. Rubinstein's tremendous digital attack once wrecked a piano of the late Queen Victoria, at a performance for the present Duke...
...Piano and Orchestra (Rochester Philharmonic with José Iturbi; Victor; 7 sides; $4.50). Late Mozart with plenty of Romantic sap. The Rochester Philharmonic, which started recording less than a year ago, again proves it is an outfit to be reckoned with. Pianist Iturbi scintillates at the keyboard, conducts the orchestra at the same time...
...best-beloved of fiddlers, Fritz Kreisler, the best-beloved of pianists hated the radio. A Paderewski recital was something to see as well as hear. Even when he was past his prime, showering wrong notes in capricious rhythms, he sat, leonine and imperious, flailed and rippled at the keyboard with his stubby $50,000 fingers. He was lavish with encores, modulating continuously from one piece into the next, sometimes for as long as an hour...