All of Rubinstein - The Rubinstein Collection, on 94 discs, documents career of pianist Arthur Rubinstein

National Review, Feb 21, 2000 by Jay Nordlinger

TIME was, when you wanted to splurge on a set of records, you bought the Beethoven symphonies, or the Chopin nocturnes, or even The Ring. You might have had 20 LPs in a big, glorious box. These days, if you have the urge (and the cash), you can come away with whole suitcases of CDs. Teldec, this season, is offering the complete works of Bach, in a project called Bach 2000-which unfolds on 153 discs. Philips, for its part, has produced Great Pianists of the 20th Century-on a clean 200 discs. Most gratifyingly, we have, from BMG, The Rubinstein Collection, on 94 discs, documenting the career of the pianist Arthur Rubinstein. There are worse ways to spend $1,500. Rarely has a record company produced something so exalting.

In the recent Man of the Century business, we had no Pianist of the Century. But if we had named one, the winner would undoubtedly have been Rubinstein-and he would have received plenty of votes for Man, too. Rubinstein was idolized by millions, and he was most people's idea of a concert musician. His recordings have sold more than any other pianist's (which speaks well of the public taste). BMG's collection includes more than 700 of those recordings, all expertly remastered, and they amount to more than 100 hours of music. This is not merely quantity for quantity's sake, as with some of these monster sets, but the chronicle of a major life, as well as a large slice of musical history.

Consider: Rubinstein was born in 1887, made his first record in 1928, retired in 1976, and died in 1982, just before his 96th birthday. When the pianist was born, to a Polish-Jewish family in Lodz, Brahms still had ten more years to live; Richard Strauss was in his early 20s. When he died, John Cage was already 70; Shostakovich (whose life was long and full) had been dead for seven years. Think of it another way: Rubinstein's first mentor was Joseph Joachim, the great violinist and friend of Brahms. Rubinstein once played a concerto under Joachim's direction. He also played (and recorded) concertos under Daniel Barenboim, who even now is considered a youngish conductor. Rubinstein contained worlds within him. In his later years, he liked to remind people that, for him, Brahms was not an "old master," but a "living composer"-and so, given his musical imagination and empathy, were all the others.

In listening to his recordings, can we say that we have heard him, and that we know his playing? In fact, we can. For a variety of reasons, some of them mystical, certain musicians record well, while others do not. Certain musicians are able to transmit the essence of themselves through recordings, while others are simply dead to vinyl or any other technology, a shadow of their live-and-in-person selves. Rachmaninoff, to take a tragic example, did not record well-we have barely a flavor of his greatness in his recordings. Myra Hess, too, is more or less lost to the living: She detested recording, rarely submitted to it, and did it poorly. Godowsky, one of the most incandescent pianists of all time, was a disaster in the studio, and did not make live recordings.

Rubinstein, though, is alive and well, just as he planned. His son John says, wonderingly, that, when he listens to his father's albums, he feels as if the old master were in the room with him, "telling me all the most true things about himself." So it is with the rest of us. Rubinstein had a gift for recording as powerful as that for performing (and they are two distinct gifts, though of course related). He treated record-making as a grave responsibility, and something like a holy act. He refrained from recording until 1928 because he thought that earlier technologies made the piano sound like a banjo! In that pivotal year, however, he stepped into the studio with the Chopin Barcarolle, and never turned back. Of that first experience, he later recalled, "I had tears in my eyes. It was the kind of performance I had dreamed of, and the sound reproduced faithfully the golden tone of the piano. This was a very important day. A new life began for me." Rubinstein had discovered a grail-that exhilarating and reassuring "feeling of perpetuation."

Countless words have been written about Rubinstein's playing, but Barenboim, in an interview for the Collection, speaks as well as anyone: Rubinstein was "a wonderfully amusing person and a remarkable storyteller. He was a grand seigneur, always in control of the situation in the most affable and charming way. [What has this to do with his playing? Hang on a second.] He was extremely erudite, very well read, an accomplished linguist. He spoke many languages [eight, actually]. He knew his Goethe in German, his Shakespeare in English, his Balzac in French, his Turgenev in Russian. And when he played, you heard all that. There was a richness in his expression that [in addition to springing from his innate musicianship] came from his general culture."

When Rubinstein played Spanish music, he was thoroughly, idiomatically, a Spaniard, and when he played French music, a Frenchman, and so on. His playing had a quality of "just rightness" about it that is breathtakingly apparent in the Collection's sweep. If you believe for a moment that he was a Chopin specialist, listen to him in the Haydn F-minor variations, or in the Beethoven early C-major sonata, or in Debussy's Reflets dans l'eau. For that matter, put him to the truest test, and listen to him in Mozart. (How did Rubinstein approach Mozart? "On my knees.")