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 Artur Rubinstein - a pianist
   
He was born on 28 January 1887 in Lodz; died on 20 December 1982 in Geneva.

    Rubinstein took his first piano lessons from Adolf Prechner in Lodz. He first appeared in public at the age of seven, playing music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Schubert and Felix Bartholdy-Mendelssohn in his home town. Having continued his education under Aleksander Rozycki in Warsaw, he left for Berlin in 1897 to study the piano in the class of Heinrich Barth and theory under Max Bruch and Robert Kahn at the Hochschule für Musik.

    His debut as a pianist took place on 1st December 1900 in Berlin's Beethoven-Saal; he played Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's PIANO CONCERTO IN A MAJOR and Camille Saint-Saëns' PIANO CONCERTO IN G MINOR with Berliner Philharmoniker. The concert was his artistic triumph. In April 1902 he played Saint-Saëns' CONCERTO at Warsaw Philharmonic. In 1903 Ignacy Jan Paderewski invited him twice for consultation to his villa in Riond Bosson, Switzerland.
     When he moved to Paris in 1904, he met the impresario Gabriel Astruc and signed a contract with him. This sparked off his great international career, taking him on world-round tours: to the United States in 1906 (New York's Carnegie Hall, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston), Vienna, Rome, Russia, London (where he played in duo with Pablo Casals and Jacques Thilbaud), Spain, and, on a number of occasions, to Warsaw to give a series of recitals.

    After Mussolini's anti-Jewish laws were proclaimed in 1938, Rubinstein cancelled his Italian concerts, returned the decorations received from the Italian government and, in October 1939, left with his family for the United States. He became an American citizen in 1946, refusing ever to play in Germany in protest of Nazi crimes.

    His post-war visits to Poland took place in 1958, 1960, 1966, 1975,  and his last visit to Poland and to his home town took place in 1979.