Artur Rubinstein

| I MENTIONED, recently, a 1974 visit to Liverpool by the legendary pianist Artur Rubinstein. He brought his own piano and played a good few wrong notes, but he was 87.

Among the legendary musicians it has brought to Huddersfield are Pablo Casals, Artur Rubinstein, Dame Myra Hess, Kathleen Ferrier, Paul Robeson, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears.

He has been invited by festivals, such as the International Chopin Piano Festival in Duszniki Zdroj, the International Festival of Young Laureates of Music Competitions Silesia in Katowice, and the Artur Rubinstein Festival of Lodz Philharmonic.

(They got a purple seashell--a color and shape just not seen in architecture 46 years ago.) And they insisted the new, city-owned hall must bring world-class artists to its stage, superstars like Luciano Pavarotti, Vladimir Horowitz, Ella Fitzgerald and Artur Rubinstein.

I am falling asleep at age two or three; my father is working in his study after supper, and from the RCA hi-fi in the living room comes the sound of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's voice singing Schubert songs: "An Die Musik," "Der Lindenbaum," and "Lachen und Weinen." Every year I would hear something new added to Dad's collection: Artur Rubinstein was a favourite, as much for his aristocratic bearing at the piano as his interpretive brilliance in Beethoven, Mozart, or Schubert.

His recordings have won numerous accolades, including the 2001 UNESCO Prize and in 2011 he was awarded the "Una Vita Nella Musica - Artur Rubinstein" prize, which is considered the Nobel Prize for music.

Artur Rubinstein was the judge, and I have a rare tape of it.

Returning from the kitchen with a tray boasting my wife's Sunday-best crockery, I found him studying my collection of Chopin Noctures, played by Artur Rubinstein. He professed himself to be highly impressed and invited me to play some of the music while we talked.

I cited Mahler, Artur Rubinstein, Itzhak Perlman, Isaac Stern, Daniel Barenboim, as well as philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza and wondered aloud if it was the very fact of being a people who were constantly persecuted from one place to another that produced this multi-talented, multi-lingual diaspora.