Iturbi

During recent years Spain has sent the U. S. many an expert musician. 'Cellist Pablo Casals and Soprano Lucrezia Bori led the procession. They were followed by Conductor Enrique Fernandez Arbos, guest of the St. Louis Symphony, Guitarist Andres Segovia, and Dancer Argentina who makes music with her heels and castanets. This year has added two more names, the Aguilar Lutanists (TIME, Dec. 2) and Jose Iturbi, famed throughout Europe and South America as Spain's greatest pianist.

Jose Iturbi was born in Valencia 34 years ago. In his early 'teens he won honors at the Valencia and Paris Conservatories but today he says that he has learned most by listening. At 24, while playing in a Zurich cafe, he was asked to go to the Geneva Conservatory as head of the piano faculty, a post once held by the great Franz Liszt. He accepted, stayed in Geneva for four years, then embarked on a concert career with immediate success.

Two months ago Iturbi arrived in the U. S. Sailing up Manhattan harbor, he wept. He went to a hotel chosen for him by his manager, rang for tea but, knowing no English, failed to make the waiter understand. He shrugged his shoulders, sat down at the piano, played Tea for Two, got what he wanted. His first Manhattan night was spent in a Harlem cabaret listening to brazen jazz which he adores, his second at a musicomedy. Then he started on a tour, played first with the Philadelphia Orchestra, went into Canada, then through the Middle West.

Conductor Willem Mengelberg of the New York Philharmonic welcomed Iturbi on his return to Manhattan. He gave him a birthday party, had a many-layered cake fashioned to represent a skyscraper. Iturbi, hugely pleased, cut it with a swoop while Pianist Ernest Schelling looked on with greedy eye. Iturbi sneaked his portion away, took it back to his hotel and sent it, adorned with two candles, to his twelve-year-old daughter in Paris. Soon afterward he appeared as Philharmonic Soloist under Mengelberg, won the acclaim of critics and public alike. Last week he gave a Manhattan recital solo.

Mozart's A Major Sonata, Schumann's Arabesque, Brahms' Variations on a theme by Paganini, smaller quantities of Chopin, Debussy, Albeniz--such was the varied course which Iturbi chose to run. Because he had played Mozart with the Philharmonic, his audience was not surprised to hear him endow the Sonata with a cool, fresh beauty seldom equalled. The Brahms technical difficulties were topped at a speed which was never bewildering. Debussy, despite its mistiness, had structure, clarity.

When Iturbi finished his program no one left Carnegie Hall. Many rushed forward to watch his square fingers more closely, called for encore after encore. He will play once more in Manhattan, then go westward again. Now that he is a success there will accompany him the kind of press stories the public most eagerly devours. Many will be interested to know now that he likes apples, oysters, caviar, expensive cigars; that he plays good tennis, boxes, dances, does subtle imitations of Charlie Chaplin, Lon Chaney, Pianists Wanda Landowska and George Gershwin; that O'Rossen of Paris makes his clothes, Chanel his perfume; that he is inevitably late save for engagements of one sort. When he is scheduled to appear in concert he is always meticulously prompt for he feels it a grave responsibility to be Jose Iturbi, Spain's greatest pianist.

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