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Warm, lyrical, and aristocratic in his interpretations, Artur Rubinstein performed impressively into extremely old age, and he was a keyboard prodigy almost from the time he could climb onto a piano bench. He came from a mercantile rather than a musical family, but fixated on the piano as soon as he heard it. At age three he impressed Joseph Joachim, and by the age of seven he was playing Mozart, Schubert, and Mendelssohn at a charity concert in his hometown. In Warsaw, he had piano lessons with Alexander Róóycki; then in 1897 he was sent to Berlin to study piano with Heinrich Barth and theory with Robert Kahn and Max Bruch, all under Joachim's general supervision. In 1899 came his first notable concerto appearance in Potsdam. Soon thereafter, just barely a teenager, he began touring Germany and Poland.

After brief studies with Paderewski in Switzerland in 1903, Rubinstein moved to Paris, where he met Ravel, Dukas, and Jacques Thibaud, and played Saint-Saëns' G minor concerto to the composer's approval. That work would remain a flashy Rubinstein vehicle for six decades, and it was the concerto he offered in his American debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra in New York's Carnegie Hall in 1906. His under-prepared American tour was not especially well-received, though, so he withdrew to Europe for further study. Rubinstein became an adept and sensitive chamber musician and accompanist; his 1912 London debut was accompanying Pablo Casals, and during World War I he toured with Eugène Ysaÿe.

He gave several successful recitals in Spain during the 1916-1917 season, and soon toured Latin America. Along the way he developed a great flair for Hispanic music; Heitor Villa-Lobos went so far as to dedicate to Rubinstein his Rudepoêma, one of the toughest works in the repertory. Although Rubinstein would later be somewhat typecast as a Chopin authority, his readings of Falla, Granados, and Albéniz would always be equally idiomatic.

Rubinstein's international reputation grew quickly, although he was by his own account a sloppy technician. In the mid-1930s he withdrew again and drilled himself in technique. By 1937 he reemerged as a musician of great discipline, poise, and polish -- qualities he would mostly retain until his farewell recital in London in 1976, at the age of 89. Rubinstein's temperament had sufficient fire for Beethoven but enough poetry for Chopin; his tempos and dynamics were always flexible, but never distorted. His 1960s recordings for RCA of nearly all Chopin's solo piano music have been considered basic to any record collection since their release, and his version of Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain is another classic, as are his various late collaborations with the Guarneri Quartet.

Rubinstein became a naturalized American citizen in 1946, but he maintained residences in California, New York, Paris, and Geneva; two of his children were born in the United States, one in Warsaw, and one in Buenos Aires. He had married Aniela Mlynarska in 1932, but womanizing remained integral to his reputation as an irrepressible bon vivant. He maintained that the slogan "wine, women, and song" as applied to him meant 80 percent women and only 20 percent wine and song.

Still, there was a serious side to his life. After World War II, he refused ever again to perform in Germany, in response to the Nazi extermination of his Polish family. Rubinstein became a strong supporter of Israel; in gratitude, an international piano competition in his name was instituted in Jerusalem in 1974. His honors included the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society of London, the U.S. Medal of Freedom (1976), and membership in the French Legion of Honor.

Cellist and conductor Alfred Wallenstein was a prodigy on his instrument, and later became the principal cellist in two of America's finest orchestras. As a conductor, he made music over the radio on a regular basis, using that "podium of the air" to perform neglected works and those written by contemporary composers.

Wallenstein could boast of a distinguished lineage: his Austrian father was a descendent of Count Wallenstein, who played a crucial role in Europe's seventeenth-century political arena. Soon after his birth, the family moved to Los Angeles. At age eight, Alfred was given a cello by his father and began lessons with the mother of composer Ferde Grofé. Following further studies with Julius Klengel, he made his debut in Los Angeles and swiftly gained a reputation as a child prodigy. After touring the country through the Orpheum theatre network, he returned to California and, at the age of 17, was appointed to the San Francisco Symphony. Subsequently, he was engaged by the famous dancer Anna Pavlova to perform as solo cellist in a South and Central American tour.

In 1919, Wallenstein joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, becoming that ensemble's youngest member. Engaged by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1922, Wallenstein traveled back to the city of his birth to perform under Frederick Stock, often as featured soloist, and to take up a teaching position at the Chicago Musical College. In 1929, Arturo Toscanini engaged Wallenstein as principal cellist of the New York Philharmonic, a post he held until the Italian conductor's departure in 1936. There, too, Wallenstein was frequently presented as soloist in many of the most important cello concertos. From Toscanini, he also received the advice that he employ his exceptional musicianship as a conductor rather than remaining an instrumentalist.

In 1931, therefore, Wallenstein entered the conducting phase of his career by directing for a radio broadcast. The year following, he was appointed leading conductor for the Hollywood Bowl and, in 1933, he began conducting his own Sinfonietta on New York's radio station WOR. In 1935, he was made the station's music director.

Wallenstein held to the high road in matters of musical quality with both his Sinfonietta and the Symphony of Strings. Many neglected masterworks were revived and newly composed works were given a hearing, given exposure to audiences numbering in the hundreds of thousands. In addition to his regular orchestral programs, he undertook several special series. One, heard on Sunday evenings, was devoted to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Another, heard Saturday evenings, offered the operas of Mozart, some of which were not familiar to American audiences. A third series presented contemporary American choral works and yet another featured pianist Nadia Reisenberg in the piano concertos of Mozart.

Wallenstein's guest appearances included those with the Cleveland, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and the NBC orchestras. Columbia Records issued several Mozart works with Wallenstein directing his Sinfonietta. In 1943, he returned to the Los Angeles Philharmonic as its music director, a post he held until 1956. In 1968, he joined the faculty at the Juilliard School of Music, becoming head of the orchestral department in 1971.

During the latter part of his conducting career, Wallenstein often accompanied some of the world's most distinguished artists, such as Artur Rubinstein and Jascha Heifetz.

The Symphony of the Air grew out of Toscanini's NBC Symphony Orchestra. NBC had hired the best musicians, many of them first chairs of their orchestras, specifically to perform with Toscanini on NBC's radio broadcasts. Toscanini built the group into a lean, precision orchestra, recognized around the world. NBC dissolved the group after Toscanini's retirement in the spring of 1954. Most of its members (with a few new players) reassembled as the Symphony of the Air and at 11:30 pm on September 21, 1954, made a recording to raise money. On October 27 they gave their first public concert. The concert was conductorless; they played the music the way Toscanini had drilled it into them.

Though the Symphony of the Air had no music director, Leonard Bernstein in effect led the orchestra during its first season. It was the Symphony of the Air that made the celebrated Omnibus TV program that played Beethoven's discarded ideas for his Fifth Symphony. The first season was a financial and artistic success, and included a triumphal State Department-backed Asian tour and a summer season in the Catskills that drew 60,000 ticket buyers.

A second Asian good-will tour was scheduled for the spring of 1956. Prof. Donald C. Meyer of Lake Forest College in Illinois has concluded that what happened next was character assassination by disaffected orchestra members, including one who was fired for drunken and immoral actions on the first tour and others who objected to the orchestra's hiring black and women players.

They went to Brooklyn Democratic Congressman John Rooney and charged there were communists in the orchestra. Rooney used the allegations (which Meyer has concluded were unfounded) to attack the Republican administration State Department in the election year of 1956, as payback for Joseph McCarthy's similar attacks against the Democrats before the 1952 campaign. As a result, the tour was cancelled. The orchestra lost its Mutual Radio contract, much of its financial support, and a lot of ticket sales. The incident, says Meyer, was not the direct cause of the orchestra's eventual demise, but did start the process, abetted by poor management decisions. Despite much artistic success, morale slipped. Debt piled up, and its quality eroded as up to half its original membership had left by the time it disbanded, deeply in debt, in 1963.

Even so, the Symphony of the Air was an important voice for new music, led by such conductors as Reiner, Bruno Walter, Bernstein, Monteux, and Beecham, and made outstanding recordings labels including Columbia, Vanguard, and United Artists. It recorded on RCA as "...His Symphony Orchestra" (e.g. "Morton Gould and his Symphony Orchestra"; "Leopold Stokowski and His Symphony Orchestra"). It was with the Symphony of the Air that 14-year-old Daniel Barenboim made his New York debut, and it was with it that Van Cliburn played in triumph at Carnegie Hall after winning the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958.