Word: rubinstein
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...note, banging the piano lid down on their fingers. At four, he was performing at charity concerts, pressing his engraved calling cards on everyone he met: ARTUR THE GREAT PIANO VIRTUOSO. It annoyed him even then that people always asked if he was any kin to the great Anton Rubinstein, and so he took to prancing around town with the words NO RELATION inscribed on the front of his sailor...
...with the Berlin Symphony. In 1906, thanks to the influence of a U.S. music critic who had heard him play at Paderewski's Swiss villa, the young pianist was signed for a tour of the U.S. It was a dud. At his debut in Carnegie Hall, the critics dismissed Rubinstein for being, as one put it, "half-baked?not a prodigy, not an adult." Those were the days when he was playing with more fire than accuracy...
King & Queen. Dejected, Rubinstein returned to Europe, and for the next four years he missed as many meals as he did notes. Nothing seemed to go right. He tried suicide, but the frazzled belt he used snapped under his weight. "The American critics were right," he admits. "In those days I dropped maybe 30% of the notes. My difficulty was that I had so much vitality and dash that I could get away with murder in Europe. But in America they felt that because they paid their money they were entitled to hear all the notes...
...Rubinstein was scheduled to play only four concerts in Spain, but his hot-handed treatment of Spanish music so floored the audiences that he crisscrossed the country for 120 additional performances. He was feted and fawned over like a toreador. The Queen Mother, Maria Cristina, invited him to the palace for tea. King Alfonso XIII became an intimate. ("He was the most tone-deaf man I ever knew," says Rubinstein. "From the time he was seven, he was accompanied by a man assigned to nudge him whenever the national anthem was played.") His new success led to a tour...
Bunch of the Boys. The Rubinstein who returned to Paris in 1920 had money, a growing reputation, and a still unsatiated hunger for the gay life of a gadabout bachelor ("I was 90% interested in women," he chuckles). He shared an apartment with a count, tooled around the boulevards in "a little carriage," and "was thin as a stick because I never went to bed until the morning." On Saturday nights he toured the cafes with a bunch of the boys?Milhaud, Auric, Poulenc?and helped popularize their music, as well as that of his friends Debussy, Saint-Saens, Ravel...