Word: concerting
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...typical playful fashion, began the 80th year of the world's greatest pianist. The birthday was only a few weeks ago, and the days that followed were typical, too, of Rubinstein. There was a concert to be played in Boston, so he packed his suitcases, not forgetting a shoe bag crammed with the good-luck charms that his four children have given him over the years?baby shoes, a turquoise marble, a set of jacks, a pipe-cleaner doll, an acorn, a crumbled plaster angel. He put on his fur-lined blue suede shoes and his long navy blue overcoat...
Arriving early at Boston's Symphony Hall the following afternoon, Rubinstein found that Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 10 had erroneously been put into the program. He had not played it in two years. With scarcely a shrug, he retired to a piano backstage to brush up. By concert time he had it down pat, and during the performance he played it faultlessly. Later, after the inevitable post-concert dinner party in the suburbs, Rubinstein decided to hire a limousine for the 200-mile return trip to Manhattan. "Let's do it!" he cried. "It will be an adventure...
...voice that sounded like a gargling cello. He pulled out a great smokestack of a cigar, passed it beneath his nose, pierced one end, lit it, puffed three times, closed his eyes, leaned back and sighed, "Ahhh, good!" Basking in a lazy curl of smoke, he mused: "At every concert I leave a lot to the moment. I must have the unexpected, the unforeseen. I want to risk, to dare. I want to be surprised by what comes out. I want to enjoy it more than the audience. That way the music can bloom anew. It's like making love...
...some silly thing?sip orange juice, cut my nails, make a little exercise on the piano. But once I pass the door on to the stage, all my energies get together and I become as quiet as possible. I always look for my receiver at the beginning of a concert. I sincerely believe in magnetic emanations?ESP, mediums?all of it. Once I find my receiver?it can be anyone, a sexy young girl, an old man?I play to him. The rest of the audience assists...
...unfinished business." He adds with a twinkle: "That's why I can still make at my age a great deal of progress." And there he goes, bright as a trill, hat cocked over an eye, Brahms and Mozart and Chopin singing in his head?off to play another concert...