Word: rubinstein
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...describe his Persephone was not too illuminating: "A nose," he said, "is not manufactured; a nose just is. Thus, too, my art." In the case of Persephone, the nose is neither ballet nor oratorio nor melodrama. A curiously hybrid work, it was first performed by the dancer Ida Rubinstein in 1934 and calls for a tenor, a chorus and full orchestra, and a leading lady who declaims a French text by André Gide while she dances. Persephone's score ranks with Stravinsky's most tautly constructed music-in his best neoclassic style-but as a stage piece...
...sideline trivia. Others try to be first with news of a great concert by talking about it before it happens, which is easy but not apt to be informative. We confess to a general prejudice in favor of talking about the event afterward-to review how well Artur Rubinstein actually played rather than to anticipate his reception from a desire to appear first...
...four men are as different in their relationship to the public as they are in their approach to the piano. While Rubinstein strides the stage with old-fashioned exuberance and verve, Serkin is more nearly the scholar, Horowitz the prophet, and Richter the mystic. At 16, Rubinstein's vision of the good life was "to sit next to a lovely woman in a concert hall and hold her hand and listen to Tchaikovsky"; with a gusto born of love, he has been clutching the hand of the public ever since. And although he has long since banished Tchaikovsky from...
...Rubinstein, whom his friend Thomas Mann called "that civilized man," is a product of the same Europe that Mann knew, a Europe that also nurtured such pianists as Benno Moiseiwitsch and Wilhelm Backhaus. Indeed, Rubinstein could have stepped out of a Mann novel. His enthusiasm for food, wines, cigars, paintings and fine editions is legendary, and his cultural interests extend far beyond his music. He reads omnivorously in eight languages, hobnobs more with writers than he does with musicians, occasionally regrets that he did not follow a youthful urge to become a novelist. His piano playing seems the consequence...
...Rubinstein prides himself on being "a very normal person" ("I don't think anyone can beat me on that"), and when he sits down at the piano to ruminate on Chopin, say, or Schumann, he does so with the majestic air of a man who can look beneath the surface to the ultimate simplicities of great art. No other pianist achieves quite the same authority, nor does any other contemporary command Rubinstein's remarkable elegance of tone. Big or small, the sound is always rich and full-in contrast to that of the younger pianists who tend...