Word: pianist
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Unlike most popular songwriters, 47-year-old Lecuona is also a virtuoso concert pianist and a composer of symphonic music. Son of a Havana newspaperman, he began composing at the age of eleven with a two-step called Cuba Y America. Cuban military bands still play it. A boyhood star at Havana's National Conservatory under Composer Joaquin Nin, Lecuona organized his own band and appeared in Havana's movie houses in long trousers borrowed from an older friend. At 21 he traveled to the U.S. and made player-piano rolls of his early hits...
...among the first to introduce rumba music to the U.S. public-in 1922 at Broadway's Capitol Theatre. Later he went to Paris, where he hobnobbed with the late Maurice Ravel and continued studying the piano. Then he toured Europe, Central and South America as a concert pianist. He has since made equally wide but more informal tours with a rumba outfit called Lecuona's Cuban Boys, has also written 30 musical comedies, most of them in collaboration with Cuban Librettist Gustavo Galarraga...
Beethoven: "Archduke" Trio, Op. 97, No. 7 (Artur Rubinstein, pianist, Jascha Heifetz, violinist, Emanuel Feuermann, cellist; Victor; 10 sides). There is no doubt at all about this masterpiece's authorship. This great trio's performance of it was magnificently recorded before Cellist Feuermann's death a year...
...MGMarksmen ring no resounding bell, but they do bag 1) an average musical wartime romance (Private Gene Kelly v. Colonel's-Daughter Kathryn Grayson), 2) a brisk, hefty variety show featuring a clutch of M.G.M. stars and three bands (Kay Kyser, Bob Crosby, Benny Carter), 3) Pianist José Iturbi in his screen debut...
...WAVES. Red Skelton is a soda jerker with an allergy for ice cream. Judy Garland makes scat-singing like "Tchai-tchai-tchaikovsky" bearable in Let There Be Music. Senor Iturbi, forced by the curious exigencies of the screen to prove that he is almost anything else but a ranking pianist, trots out some fair boogie-woogie, takes care to play nothing worth hearing in one of the best recordings a screen piano has ever received...