Word: rubinstein
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Like a Bee. Somewhere between the last gush of the romantics and the first blush of the moderns, emerged Artur Rubinstein. Like a browser at a rummage sale, he sampled the new and the old and took the best from each. From the new he learned respect for the notes; from the old, devotion to what goes on between the notes. "I approached all those pianists like a bee," he says. "I owe them quite a lot, but I dismissed a lot in them too. If there's anything original about me, it is a composite of all of them...
Pedal & Heart. This ability to project the grand design of the music, to crystallize the ebb and flow of its inner voices, is at the foundation of Rubinstein's artistry. His music, especially compared with the neurotic fancy-flights of other pianists, is also remarkable for its sanity, directness and healthy emotionalism. Beyond that, he possesses an elegance of tone that is the envy of the profession. With a combination of pedal, touch and heart, he sings his way into the poetic soul of the music. He can take a diminuendo passage and without spoiling the line, make it grow...
...Rubinstein has no idea how he produces his tone. It comes partly from a physique that looks as though it had walked out of a fun-house mirror. His dimensions (5 ft. 8 in., 167 Ibs.) are deceiving. His trunk is too short for his legs; yet he has the arms and hands of a man twice his size. His biceps are as big as a shotputter's, and his fist looks like the business end of a sledge hammer. His fingers, whose tips are cushioned from years of "cleaning the piano's teeth," are spatula-shaped; the all-important...
When it comes to exercising the fingers, Rubinstein contends that too much practice destroys the spontaneity of a performance. Besides, he says, "I want to live?live passionately. So I don't believe in all this nonsense of tying oneself to the keyboard all day." While most musicians practice for five of six hours every day, he will go for days without looking at a piano. Some younger pianists, he says, in their note-niggling pursuit of perfection, end up "taking a performance out of their pocket instead of out of their heart." This lack of involvement, he feels, extends...
Little Fiend. There are few musicians today who can claim such a firsthand connection with "the old days." Rubinstein was born in 1887, in the shabby industrial town of Lodz, Poland, where his father owned a small handloom factory. He was the last of seven children. "My mother did not want a seventh child," he explains, "so she decided to get rid of me before I was born. Then a marvelous thing happened. My aunt dissuaded her, and so I was permitted to be born. Think of it! It was a miracle...