By Tim Page
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, March 5, 2000; Page G01

Arthur Rubinstein made his United States debut at the Philadelphia Academy of Music on Jan. 8, 1906. Seventy years later, at the age of 89, his vision so clouded that he could barely see the keyboard in front of him, the pianist played his final American concert in April 1976.

It is perhaps not quite the longest performing career in history, but it's mighty close. Moreover, Rubinstein was a genuine popular hero for much of his life. A vast number of people considered him the pianist of his era, and the release of a glorious and extravagant compact disc set--"The Rubinstein Collection" (BMG Classics)--only serves to support such a conclusion.

We have clearly entered the age of massive retrospective packages from our record companies; BMG alone has produced similarly gargantuan releases devoted to recordings by violinist Jascha Heifetz and conductor Arturo Toscanini, among others.

With 94 CDs, 106 hours of music and a price tag that hovers around $1,400, this is hardly a casual investment. (BMG will begin to issue the discs separately this summer.) But why would anyone, in a single swipe of the credit card, purchase a mass of music larger than most radio stations' playlists?

Rubinstein was one of those rare classical artists who won not only world admiration but also abiding personal affection from millions of listeners. Along with Enrico Caruso, Marian Anderson, Leonard Bernstein, Luciano Pavarotti and a very few others, he seemed both larger than life and an enormously likable fellow human being.

He clearly loved to play the piano and sometimes made his gift appear just one more facet of the hedonic "good life"--with its succession of five-star hotels, sophisticated parties, vintage wines and eager lovers--that Rubinstein came to embody so effortlessly. Yet the most valuable attribute of his playing was its unflinching, uncommonly powerful emotional directness, not quite the stuff of ballroom fripperies.

His ascent was not exactly preordained. The seventh child of a factory worker, Isaac Rubinstein, and his wife, Felicia, Rubinstein was born in the dreary industrial city of Lodz, Poland, on Jan. 28, 1887. His talent was apparent in his early youth; after studies in Warsaw and Berlin (one of his early mentors was Joseph Joachim, to whom Johannes Brahms dedicated his violin concerto), he made his professional debut in 1899 and presented his first tour of the United States while still in his teens.

He was not an unqualified success. Richard Aldrich of the New York Times called the playing "imposing" (whatever that may have meant) but found "no thought of any deeper significance that lay behind the notes." "There is little warmth or beauty in Rubinstein's tone and little variety in his effects," Aldrich continued. Several other critics thought the playing glittering but insubstantial.

It is curious that Rubinstein should have been dismissed as a mere virtuoso when he arrived on the scene, for the pianist himself later acknowledged that his technical command was not at all what it should have been. (One can yet hear an abundance of glitches in his initial recordings, made 22 years later.)

The young Rubinstein devoted all too much of his time to the pursuit of pleasure--his two autobiographies, written in the 1970s, grow rather tiresome with their litanies of celebrity walk-ons and dashing seductions. It was not until the summer of 1934 that he decided to take himself seriously.

"I didn't want my kids to grow up thinking of their father as either a second-string pianist or a has-been," he recalled later. "So I bundled my wife and baby into a small Citroen and we drove up to Saint-Nicolas-de-Veroce, a tiny village. I rented the only piano in the community--an old upright--and moved it into an empty, windowless garage just below our room. That became my studio. It had no electric light, so I put a candle on top of the piano and then I buckled down to work--six hours, eight hours, nine hours a day. And a strange thing happened. By the time we returned to Paris, I'd begun to discover new meanings, new qualities, new possibilities in music that I'd been playing regularly for more than 30 years."

Rubinstein made his first recording in 1928; two decades later, he had become far and away the best-selling classical pianist in history, on disc and in recital. In 1948 he earned the staggering sum of $110,000 in record royalties alone--this at a time when the average American's income was less than one-fortieth that amount. He lived well and guiltlessly, comfortable with his riches.

But he never stopped working. In 1937 he took on the incredible task of touring Europe, South America, Australia, South Africa and the United States in a single year; 14 years later, he played 20 concerts in 23 days during a visit to Israel. In 1961 it was a set of 10 concerts at Carnegie Hall, the proceeds of which went to charity. His playing, increasingly informed by a steady practice regimen, a patrician disdain for aural effects and an acutely sensitive comprehension of life's joys and sorrows, grew ever more wonderful as he matured.

Or didn't mature, as the case may be, for the famously "gregarious" Rubinstein could be quite petty in his dealings with the people closest to him. Harvey Sachs's authoritative biography sometimes seems a chronicle of theatrical breaks and reconciliations.

Although Rubinstein married the former Aniela Mlynarska in 1932, he carried on numerous affairs throughout their union and finally dropped her altogether in the mid-1970s, when he was almost 90, after which he took up with a much younger woman, Annabelle Whitestone.

According to Sachs, Rubinstein's four children (the last of whom was born when he was past 60) remember him with a mixture of love, awe, anger and disappointment. His daughter Eva put it succinctly: "He was a man who never should have had children. Perhaps he should have had his wife and a merry old time all over the world, but once there are children it's not so easy. He saw himself as the paterfamilias and Jewish patriarch, but he didn't know what that involved."

Throughout the 1940s, Rubinstein was part of an active musical community on the West Coast that included Heifetz and the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. (When you add to the mix writers such as Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood, as well as composers Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, all of whom were California residents during this time, it seems a safe assertion that Los Angeles has never before or since played such a prominent role in the life of the mind.)

By 1954, Rubinstein had moved to New York City, and he spent his last years mostly in Paris and Switzerland, where he died, of cancer, in Geneva, on Dec. 20, 1982. Because he had become a prominent and outspoken supporter of Israeli causes, it was in Jerusalem that his ashes were buried after a restrained and appropriately intimate private service. Rubinstein's passing was front-page news throughout the world, and many people felt as if they had lost not only a great artist but a cherished friend.

Perusing the Discs

A rule of thumb for those who would approach the daunting, delicious plenitude of the "Rubinstein Collection": in general, the later the pianist's recording of any given piece, the wiser, more musical and altogether better-played it is likely to be. (There are many exceptions, of course, and in the last few years of recording--say, after 1971--the listener will encounter some distinct signs of physical deterioration.) Still, as a general maxim, this is a pretty reliable one. Rubinstein continued to grow in artistic stature until he was well into his eighties, and his most consistent single decade was undoubtedly the 1960s.

This may prove to be a helpful tip, for many works are duplicated throughout the "Rubinstein Collection" (which contains not only all of the pianist's approved and previously released performances but also a few short pieces never before released). There are three complete sets of the Beethoven piano concertos, taped in 1956, 1967 and 1975. Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2 was recorded four times--in 1931, 1946, 1958 and 1968--while the same composer's Barcarolle (Op. 60) is represented in five different versions, dating from 1928 to 1964.

What was it that made Rubinstein so outstanding? Certainly, he never developed the sort of "How in the world did he do that?" technique that became the stock in trade of his supposed rival, Vladimir Horowitz. But Horowitz excelled in a sort of ostentatious, arbitrary brilliance that was alien to Rubinstein's organic and deeply rooted musicianship. The best of Horowitz is to be found in recordings of display pieces--his own set of variations on themes from "Carmen," for example, or a Niagara-like burst through a transcription of "The Stars and Stripes Forever." (Some unaccountably restrained performances of Scarlatti and Clementi are also quite fine.) But most of Horowitz's Chopin twitches frightfully, and there is an emphasis on momentary flash rather than structural continuity. One has the dismaying feeling that the forest has been sacrificed for the trees, and the trees have been sacrificed for a few of the lichen on their bark.

In Rubinstein's Chopin performances, there is always a sense of pulse and place. It is not surprising that he loved the composer's 51 mazurkas so much; he infuses these small, sturdy Polish dances with Homeric poetry, but never forgets that they are, after all, dances and not untethered meditations. Every piece, no matter how tiny, has its beginning, middle and end, and Rubinstein always knows infallibly where he is.

This was the very essence of his art. In many ways, he was a distinctly modern player: Earlier pianists had often treated Chopin's works as showpieces, tuneful opportunities for pearly lines and pretty smears that pleased audiences but did a tremendous disservice to the 19th century's most pristine and concentrated miniaturist.

Most of Chopin's major works are here, sometimes in two or three interpretations, and, as good as Rubinstein's early performances of many of these pieces are, they rarely compare to the ones he made in fullest maturity. The set of nocturnes he recorded in 1965 is unmatched: a miraculous balance of singing line, tonal luster, poetic nuance, romantic fancy and classical form.

Indeed, one finds an uncanny essentialism in Rubinstein's late recordings. The tempos, as if informed by some golden mean, are neither propulsive nor lingering, only perfect. The musicianship is imbued with a familiarity and simplicity that is anything but easily won, and the noble lines from T.S. Eliot's "Little Gidding" come to mind:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Unfortunately, there are some important omissions in Rubinstein's Chopin catalogue. Although he recorded the ballades, the scherzos, the polonaises, the impromptus and many other works, he never felt comfortable with the technical challenges in the two sets of Etudes, Op. 10 and Op. 25, and recorded only selected numbers from both of them. (The posthumously published, ethereally beautiful "Trois Nouvelles Etudes" are of an altogether different character, and exist in two heartbreakingly lovely renditions.)

And he recorded the complete set of Preludes (Op. 28) only once, much too early in his career. These 1946 performances are tense, harsh, erratic and bizarrely offhanded. Rubinstein himself knew it; "My Preludes aren't good enough," he wrote to a friend in 1974. What a shame he never returned to them.

Rubinstein was especially at home with music of the 19th century--not only with Chopin, Schumann and Brahms, all of whom he recorded extensively, but also with Cesar Franck, Edvard Grieg and Franz Liszt. It was often claimed that he played Mozart in a manner that was effusively romantic, but the five late concertos included here are exemplary, shot through with the tragic intensity and urgent drama that most musicians of Rubinstein's era chose to ignore in these scores. (The legend of Mozart as a dainty, periwigged, perpetually sunny Wunderkind took a long time to die out.)

Although Rubinstein's performances of Beethoven's concertos were widely admired, he recorded only seven of the 32 sonatas, and few listeners are likely to count them among his stronger discs. The pianist seems to have put Beethoven on a pedestal; the magnanimous wit, grace and ease that typify most of Rubinstein's interpretations are rarely to be found. Is it possible that Rubinstein agreed with his colleague Claudio Arrau's flabbergastingly wrongheaded observation that Beethoven--Beethoven!--had no humor?

If one considers Rubinstein an artist of the post-World War II generation--and he did indeed play for a full 30 years after V-J Day--it may seem that he did little or nothing for contemporary music. But the pianist's sheer longevity makes us forget who Rubinstein's contemporaries were. Let us not forget that Brahms, Faure, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky and Saint-Saens were all alive and working when Rubinstein was born, that Claude Debussy was still only in his mid-twenties and unknown, that Rachmaninoff was a teenager and that Stravinsky had yet to celebrate his fifth birthday.

Rubinstein played music by all of these men. He recorded a good deal of unfamiliar work by composers from Spain and Latin America, among them Heitor Villa-Lobos, Manuel de Falla, Isaac Albeniz and Enrique Granados. He was devoted to the music of Karol Szymanowski, a fellow Pole and near-contemporary who has yet to receive his full due. He championed the compositions of younger men such as Serge Prokofiev, Darius Milhaud and Francis Poulenc and even went so far as to record the Second Prelude for Piano by George Gershwin.

Most of Rubinstein's recordings were for solo piano. Yet he was a sensitive and collegial partner in chamber music performances, whether with established legends such as Heifetz and Piatigorsky or with the young Guarneri String Quartet. The austere and reclusive Glenn Gould, who was in so many respects Rubinstein's temperamental opposite, once told the older man during a joint interview that the Rubinstein-Guarneri recording of the Brahms Quintet was "the greatest chamber music performance with piano that I've heard in my life." ("I'm drunk on it," Gould continued. "My notion of what Brahms represents has been changed by your recording.")

As for Rubinstein's recordings with orchestra, there are collaborations with conductors ranging from Eugene Ormandy, John Barbirolli and Fritz Reiner through Zubin Mehta and Daniel Barenboim. The most convincing set of the Beethoven concertos is the one featuring the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Erich Leinsdorf (1967), although the 1956 version with Josef Krips and the Symphony of the Air (formerly Toscanini's NBC Symphony) is charged with a certain brisk majesty. Plodding tempos and palpable frailty exclude the final version with Barenboim and the London Philharmonic (1975) from consideration.

By then, Rubinstein was growing tired. There would be only a few more concerts, a few more recordings--a Brahms concerto with the Israel Philharmonic under Mehta, Schumann's "Fantasiestucke" and, finally, Beethoven's Sonata in E-flat (Op. 31, No. 3), a sweet, playful valediction. The final disc in the collection--No. 92--contains three illuminating interviews with Rubinstein recorded in the early 1960s, when he was still at the height of his powers and positively exuding joie de vivre. A handsome hardcover book, with texts in German, French and English, completes the set.

When we listen to Rubinstein at his finest, we come in contact with that rarest of rarities--a healthy, sanguine, affirmative genius. On disc, as it was in person, the playing is full-hearted and honest, without distortion or neurotic excess. Melodies, textures and ideas well over from the piano and flow from heart to heart. At such moments, we can only echo the words of pianist Eunice Podis, who once told Harvey Sachs that the listener walked away from a Rubinstein concert "in an altered state of being."

"It was more than a satisfying musical experience," she continued. "It was on a different level from most performances. You thought the world was a better place and you were a better person."

RUBINSTEIN IN SMALLER BITES

In June, BMG will release 29 discs from "The Rubinstein Collection" separately, with another 20 slated to follow in the autumn.

After two years, virtually the entire set will be available in 81 reasonably priced modules. For those who can't wait, many earlier transfers of the pianist's recordings are already available, many at reduced prices.

BMG alone offers discs devoted to the late performances of Chopin's solo works, whether in the complete "Chopin Collection" (11 discs, reduced price, BMG 60822) or on a number of separate discs (the last recording of the nocturnes may be found on BMG 5613-2, and the polonaises are on 5615-2).

A sampling of Rubinstein's chamber music is preserved on BMG 6263-2, with music by Dvorak recorded with the Guarneri Quartet. The choice rendition of the Beethoven piano concertos (with Erich Leinsdorf and the Boston Symphony Orchestra) may be found on three discs, BMG 5674, 5675 and 5676. (For those planning to order online, please note that many of these recordings are listed under "Artur" Rubinstein, the name his manager insisted he use most of his life, for reasons that not only remain obscure but also that directly contradicted the pianist's own wishes.)

EMI Classics has issued a five-CD set of Rubinstein's early Chopin recordings, including the nocturnes, mazurkas, scherzos and concertos. While these are not generally my favorites among his several recorded versions of this great music, the set, titled "Arthur Rubinstein: Chopin" (EMI 64933), may be warmly recommended, particularly to those who prefer this artist in a flashy mood.