Arthur rubinstein probably made at least one acoustical 78 rpm recording for the Polish Favorit label, circa 1910, and he certainly made a series of piano rolls for the aeolian duo-art and Ampico Pianola companies in the United States between 1919 and 1925. But his career as a serious recording artist did not begin until 1928, when Fred Gaisberg, one of the industry's pioneers, persuaded him to visit The Gramophone Company's Studio C in the Small Queen's Hall, London, and give the procedure a fresh try. Until then, Rubinstein said, the piano had always sounded "like a banjo" on records, but with the new electrical recording process—in other words, with the use of microphones and with the other technical improvements that had accompanied its development and replaced the old acoustical horns—"the sound reproduced faithfully the golden tone of the piano." Thus, at the age of forty-one, he initiated what was to prove a highly significant part of his career. The present volume of The Rubinstein Collection includes several of his earliest recordings for HMV—His Master's Voice, the Gramophone Company's label. Rubinstein was correct in stating, in his memoirs, that the first piece he recorded for Gaisberg, on May 9, 1928, was the Chopin Barcarolle, but the version of the piece that was eventually released was a different "take" made several weeks later. Of the seven pieces he recorded at his first session, only Chopin's Waltz in A-flat Major, Op. 34, No. 1— heard here in the first of Rubinstein's three authorized recordings of this work—and a Brahms capriccio (included in volume 8 of this Collection) were released. All of the recordings on this CD were made during Rubinstein's first decade as an HMV artist, and all of the pieces represented figured prominently in his repertoire. Excepting the Chopin A-flat Major Waltz (composed in 1835). the earliest recording is of Debussy's La cathédrale engloutie ("The Sunken Cathedral)," No. 10 in the first book of Préludes for piano, written in 1909-10), recorded on January 24, 1929, in the course of Rubinstein's third HMV session. This version is much faster than Rubinstein's 1952 RCA Victor performance, and one may legiti-mately suspect that he adopted exceptionally fast tempos in order to squeeze the piece onto one side of a 78 rpm disc. Nevertheless, this performance is as calm as its successor, whereas Rubinstein's third and final recording of the piece (1961) is more unsettled and unsetding than either of its predecessors. The pieces by Granados and Falla were all recorded on July 22, 1930, by which time Rubinstein already had fifteen years' experience behind him as an admired exponent of Spanish music. There is no record of personal contact between Granados and Rubinstein, but the pianist is known to have performed La majaj el ruisenor ("The Maiden and the Nightingale") from Goyescas at least as early as 1916, five years after the work was composed; this is the first of his three authorized recordings of the piece. Falla, on the other hand, was often in Rubinstein's company during the First World War years, and Rubinstein became familiar with his ballet El amor brujo not long after its premiere in Madrid in 1915- In his memoirs, Rubinstein recalled asking for and receiving the composer's permission to create a piano arrangement of the ballet's "Ritual Fire Dance, " and he was understandably proud of the arrangement's success. But in an interview he revealed another side of the story. "I heard that piece played by a little quartet for dancing," he said, "...and I said to Falla..., 'This is a good piano piece.' He said, Nonsense.' Well, I arranged it... comfortably for the piano and played it in Madrid, and you know, if I hadn't repeated it for the third time I might have been killed. The audience wouldn't let me go on. They shrieked and yelled. I was unwilling to play three times the same piece, but they wouldn't let me go off. Then I discovered that that was a piece which absolutely fascinated all the audiences of the world, including Chinese, Japanese, wherever you can imagine. I think that when the moon will be open for concerts I will play right away the Fire Dance' and I might get away with it." The present disc contains the earliest of his three authorized recordings of the "Fire Dance" and the earlier of his two versions of the "Dance of Terror." Chopin's perennially popular Waltz in C-sharp minor (Op. 64, No. 2)—written in 1846-47* toward the end of the composer's short life— was recorded by Rubinstein for the first of three times on December 17, 1930, whereas Debussy's Prelude in A minor (Pour le piano, No. I, composed half a century after the Chopin waltz) and three pieces from Villa-Lobos' Prole do bebé (written in 1921, a year after Rubinstein met the Brazilian composer and began to proselytize on his behalf) were captured by HMVs engineers on December 14, 1931 ; he re-recorded the Debussy piece near the end of his career and the Villa-Lobos pieces twice each (three times in the case of No. 7) between 1941 and 1961. The Chopin mazurkas (Op. 33, No. 2, composed in 1837-38; Op. 56, No. 2, composed in 1843; and Op. 63, No. 1, composed in 1846) that Rubinstein recorded on July 22, 1932 may be considered a sort of appetizer to his memorable mazurka sets of I93&-39- 1952-53• and 1965-66—milestones in the history of Chopin's music on record. Rubinstein's first recording of the Forlane from Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin (composed during World War I) dates from February 23, '934; he re-recorded the piece for RCA twenty-seven years later. The latest recordings included in this selection are of Liszt's Liebestraum No. 3 (November 7, 1935), Rachmaninoff s Prelude in C-sharp minor (October 29, 1936), Liszt's Consolation (February 14, 1937), and the same composer's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 10 (April 3, 1937)- These and the other 78 rpm records that Rubinstein had made in the previous nine years helped, among other things, to improve what had been his relatively modest reputation in the United States. In the autumn of 1937 the fifty-year-old artist returned to North America for the first time in a decade and launched the extraordinarily successful final phase of his career— a phase that would last nearly forty years. —Harvey Sachs