Rubinstein-Wienawski Chamber Concert: 2nd

Includes program.

“Rubinstein has shown in the chamber concerts given on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings another phase of his wonderful talent. The qualities that make a great pianist are not those that commonly make a good trio or quartette player. The soloist is all for himself—the player of concerted music must forget himself and remember his coadjutors. The one aims at self-display, the other must practice self-abnegation. Rubinstein thinks of his art and not of himself, and where the intent of the composer is to give prominence to some other instrument the piano gracefully takes the secondary position.

But it needs more than good players to make good chamber music. There should be a perfect accord in the understanding of the work performed, and every man should be in full sympathy not only with the composition, but with his fellow players, and should comprehend all their musical ways and habits. This comes only by constant association and long practice, and this the present organization has not had. Consequently, though the individual exellences of the performers are of the highest order, the result is not the best. The old Eisfeld quartette played better, and the Mason and Thomas quartette much better, though it had no such violinist as Wieniawski, and of course no such pianist as Rubinstein. Both Tuesday evening and last night the most admirable playing, in parts, was strangely contrasted with great blunders in other portions. In the Hummel septette, for example, on Tuesday, the horn player counted his time wrong in a repeated passage three several times, and last evening, in the fourth movement of the stringed quintette by Mendelssohn, the place was lost, and for a few minutes there was a painful scramble among the players until the matter was righted. This, of course, is fatal to the best chamber music, and is absolutely a necessary consequence of setting any four or five men to the task of playing long and difficult works without sufficient previous study and rehearsal. Nor under such circumstances can all that light and shade which are the life of chamber music be properly attended to. Nevertheless those who have heard Rubinstein, and Wieniawski, and Bergner, even under these disadvantages, have heard three men who have the capacity, under proper conditions, of giving the finest trio playing ever heard in this country. With all the drawbacks that we have mentioned, the present series of chamber concerts is one on no account to be missed by those who have any sympathy with the high and noble kind of music that is now being performed at them.”

“The second Rubinstein Chamber Concert, last evening at Steinway Hall, was the occasion of a great musical enjoyment to all who were present. The programme, which included none but the compositions of the most eminent names, rising in a sort of magnificent crescendo—Schumann, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Mozart and Beethoven—was rendered with the most exquisite delicacy of finish, and the trio especially, with which the performance was brought to a close, drew forth in the most wonderful manner the powers and capacities of the artists as it gave unspeakable delight to the audience. Our citizens in general, we fear, do not appreciate the rare privilege that is offered them in these Chamber Concerts, of hearing the finest pieces in the whole treasury of musical literature performed in a style that is absolutely perfect. Could the five composers whose airier and more graceful works were played last evening have come back to hear them so faithfully and deliciously presented, it would have been a richer reward to them than all the gold snuff-boxes and public ovations they received in their life-time.”