A new music festival has been launched in Poland. It is dedicated to Arthur Rubinstein and is held in the city of Lodz.

Michal Kubicki reports.

Lodz is an obvious choice of the venue for the Rubinstein Festival. It was in this city that the legendary pianist was born in 1887. A child prodigy, he gave his first public recital in Warsaw at the age of five, and at ten played Mozart concertos in Berlin. He soon began extensive overseas tours, with a tour of the States in 1906.

Fluent in eight languages, he became wartime interpreter during World War One. He settled in the United States shortly before World War Two and consolidated his reputation as one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century.

A year ago or so, Andrzej Sułek took up the post of Managing Director of the Lodz Philharmonic and he thought a music festival in tribute to Rubinstein would be an excellent way to promote Polish music and the pianist’s native town. In Andrzej Sulek’s view, Rubinstein’s art of piano interpretation has not  lost its appeal: ‘It is still alive and moving our emotions. I was highly surprised when I read the entry on Rubinstein in the Grove Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians which is very critical of Rubinstein. I found it rather unfair because what’s obvious to me  to many pianists with whom I discussed this that what Rubinstein achieved as a pianist, his recordings made all over the world, is still fresh and moving.’
 
The featured artists at the First Rubinstein Piano Festival include Alexander Korsantija and Alexander Gavriluk, First Prize winners of the Rubinstein Competition in Tel Aviv in 1995 and 2005 respectively, as well as Emanuel Ax and Roman Rabinovich.

According to Andrzej Sułek, the festival concerts will give a splendid opportunity to see whether the Rubinstein tradition is being continued, a tradition whose hallmarks he describes in this way: ‘He never performed twice the same way. Whenever he touched the piano he created some new value. When you compare his recordings of the Mozart concerti, of his three editions of Chopin’s mazurkas or of Chopin’s nocturnes you will find how different approach was of this artist to the same music. Even if you can say that his first performances of the mazurkas were the best, you will find something inspiring, new and fresh in the recordings of the 1950s and 1960s. His imaginative force was so big that it’s impossible to say that his art became unfashionable or lost its power.’
 
The Festival is organized by the Arthur Rubinstein International Music Foundation in Lodz. The pianist’s two daughters Ewa and Alina Rubinsten are the honorary guests of the event. They will visit several schools in the city. Side-line events also include a review of documentary films about Rubinstein and exhibitions.

Rubinstein visited his home town several times. His last visit there was in 1979, three years before his death, at the age of 95