Nesser to Grieg to Rubenstein

The other day I was reading Swedish mystery writer Håkan Nesser’s book, Borkman’s Point. His detective, Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, who drives a small, elderly Opel with an up-to-date, high-end stereo, comments on a northerly drive that he needs to hear “something Nordic”: “Cold, clear and serene. Sibelius and Grieg.”

The power of suggestion later that day led me to rummage in the CD cabinet for something to listen to as I fixed dinner. What came to hand was a Chicago Symphony recording of Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor, orchestrated by Alfred Wallenstein. What I had forgotten about this CD was the pianist: Arthur Rubinstein.

The music was suitably stirring — cold, clear, serene, and Nordic — but listening to it also stirred memories of hearing Rubinstein in concert more than forty years ago.

Rubenstein (1887-1982) would have been seventy-nine in the spring of 1966, when I was a high school senior and somehow acquired tickets to a concert he gave in San Antonio, Texas. I recall going to the performance with my girlfriend (later wife) and another of our classmates. The program has long since escaped my memory, but I recall vividly the thrill of seeing this piano virtuoso at work.

Rubenstein, a Polish Jew, was born the eighth and youngest child of a businessman in Łódź. He evidenced interest in the piano during an elder sister’s lessons and by age four was studying and playing in Warsaw with Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim, who became his mentor. By age ten in 1897 he had moved to Berlin to continue his studies and in 1900 made his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic. In 1904 he launched his career in earnest in Paris. (The photograph shows him in 1906.)

Rubenstein led an amazing career that ended in 1976, when he was eighty-nine, and then only because his eyesight had begun to fail during the Seventies. I count myself fortunate to have seen and heard him a decade before his retirement. He died in Geneva, Switzerland, in December 1982, about a month shy of his 96th birthday.

January 28 will mark the 123rd anniversary of Rubenstein’s birth. I have several recordings of him that should be suitable to play for that occasion.