Grown-Up Prodigy

This season more U.S. audiences than ever are hearing the piano expertly pounded by a man who once moved Manhattan Salon-Keeper Muriel Draper to expound pertly:

". . . An ageless, grotesquely ugly face at the prow of a beautiful head. . . . Eyes pale with intensity seemed more like hieroglyphics of intelligence than eyes in a face and a somber Semitic nose carved with chastening Polish delicacy supported them. Pale firmly-full lips smiled with nervous sadness over strange teeth, and only the chin was allowed to rest a little from the forward-moving pace of his vitality. It afforded a slight pause in the breathless race to take in the rest. The next minute you realized that its backward movement was controlled with a fierceness that could defeat a Napoleon. . . ."

Such, or thereabouts, is Artur Rubinstein, Polish prodigy who has been a professional pianist for 42 of his 53 years. He is now on a 25-week tour. For pianistic form and box-office appeal, Rubinstein rates with the best of them--polished Josef Hofmann (56 years at the keyboard); titanic Sergei Rachmaninoff; glittering Vladimir Horowitz; sober Artur Schnabel; suave Walter Gieseking (now in Switzerland); rippling-fingered Moriz Rosenthal, 79-year-old pupil of Liszt.

A globetrotter, in one 13-month period Rubinstein gave 72 concerts in Europe, 60 in South America, took his wife and two children to Paris, went to Australia for 24 dates, to London, to the U.S. He has not played in Germany since 1914. His present home (his 32nd) is in Los Angeles.

Artur Rubinstein looks mild but he at tacks the piano with the gusto of a man who says: "I prefer to die younger than to sniff around living." In London in 1937 he recorded the 56 Chopin mazurkas at one continuous sitting. A prodigious talker, he smokes fine cigars, was for years a lady-killing bachelor ("I am 99% interested in women"). Rubinstein's bachelorhood ended nine years ago when he married Nela Mlynarski, a Lithuanian. Before she was born her father had conducted at a War saw concert whose soloist was 15-year-old Artur Rubinstein.

Artur Rubinstein is no kin to Russia's late Pianist Anton Rubinstein, one of the greatest of all time. Irritated at being continually asked whether they were related, he once bought a cap labeled "No." To Artur Rubinstein are dedicated the two toughest keyboard workouts of all time: 1) Stravinsky's "Sonata" from his ballet score Petrouchka; 2) Rudepoema, a ferocious tonal portrait of Rubinstein by Brazilian Heitor Villa-Lobos, whom the pianist helped launch. Rubinstein's tremendous digital attack once wrecked a piano of the late Queen Victoria, at a performance for the present Duke of Windsor.

New song (in San Francisco show named Patricia): Hot Dogs, Mustard and You.

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