Word: pianos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...embark upon an uncomfortable honeymoon train rides to visit their parents back East. The audience is served up a platter of cute little vignettes of the trip (most of which are featured in the previews). This fluff is washed down by the soundtrack's particularly insipid cocktail of tinkling piano chords that bob around like ice cubes in a wash of syrupy strings...
Marriage settled Rubinstein in more ways than one. Up to then, he had got by on sheer talent. But after the birth of his first child in 1933, he took up the piano in earnest; for three months, he practiced diligently at a remote mountain cottage in southeastern France. "I didn't want people telling my child after I died, 'What a pianist your father might have been,' " he explained. He emerged from his battle a master of the keyboard; at age 47, his real career was about to begin...
...former prodigy became even more prodigious. At 69, he played a marathon cycle in New York City that consisted of 17 compositions for piano and orchestra, on five programs, within two weeks; in 1961 he gave ten Carnegie Hall concerts in one season. Conductor Edouard van Remoortel was probably not exaggerating when he said that Rubinstein was "the only pianist you could wake up at midnight and ask to play any of 38 major piano concertos." Before blindness put an end to his public career in 1976, he was playing up to 100 concerts a year...
...cheers, he would sit down, adjust the tails of his formal coat, tilt his face upward at about a 45° angle and stare intently into the middle distance as he composed himself. Then the great hands would rise from his sides and come down on the keyboard. The piano, with its intricate mechanism of strings and hammers, would cease to be a percussion instrument when Rubinstein caressed it; in his hands, it sang...
...Impressionist music like a born Frenchman. Perhaps that was to be expected from a man who seemed at home everywhere and who spoke eight languages. Rubinstein was a champion of modern music in his younger days; two of the most difficult works in the repertoire, Stravinsky's piano arrangement of his own Petrushka and Villa-Lobos' Rude-poema are dedicated...