view of St. Petersburg from St. Issac's belltower
Mini Pianist-biography- from Harold Schonberg's Great Pianists
Artur Schnabel (April 17, 1882 – August 15, 1951)
"His playing had an inner calm and certainty that carried over in to his own life and his deportment on the concert stage. He once played the Brahms B flat Concerto with the New York Philharmonic under Bruno Walter. This concerto was one of his specialties, and he must have played it over a hundred times in public. In the slow movement of this performance occurred what must have happened to every artist at one time or another- a memory lapse. Schnabel went one way, the orchestra another, there was a horrified gasp from the audience and the music came to a dead stop. Walter was appalled. Schnabel merely grinned and shrugged his shoulders, got up from the piano and walked over to the podium. Two elderly grey heads bent over the score, there was a muttered injunction to the orchestra, Schnabel returned to the piano and the music began again. To any other pianists, the mental shock and embarrassment would have been impossible to overcome. Not to Schnabel. He continued to play as beautifully as before. Perhaps even more beautifully, determined to make the audience forget the lapse.
He was also a composer, and anybody who has written about Schnabel has pointed out the Schnabelain paradox: that a musician so steeped in the classical tradition should have composed such advanced music. Schnabel's compositions are abstract, frequently atonal, complicated and difficult to grasp. […] For a while, shortly before his death in 1951, his admirers tried to bring his music before the public, sponsoring well-prepared concerts. These attracted very little attention, and the chances are that Schnabel's music has disappeared for good."
