Iturbi's Week

Muscular, swart-tempered, turbulent Jose Iturbi last week did nearly everything he is good at, except conduct an orchestra or fly into a high Hispanic dudgeon. Gab-gifted, he spoke as a citizen-about-to-be on the Justice Department's I am an American radio program. A neat, nimble pianist, he gave one of his infrequent Manhattan recitals. A fledgling composer, he heard the first performance of his rambling, Spain-inspired piece, Soliloquy, in Cincinnati, then joined the Cincinnati Symphony in a crashing performance of the Tchaikovsky "juke box" piano concerto.

Jose Iturbi has been in the U.S. since 1929, has worked hard to get into big-league conducting (Ford Sunday Evening Hour, Eastman Rochester Symphony). One of his stunts has been to conduct from the keyboard, while playing a Liszt or Beethoven concerto. He enjoys periodic crescendos of rage (against jazz, hot dogs, flash bulbs, etc.), makes a point of being nearly late at concerts. He plays a Baldwin piano, and wherever he goes he is attended by a sort of caddy, supplied by the Baldwin people to look after the piano, piano stool, pianist. Plaintively the caddy says: "It don't seem right." Nor does the caddy ever get the piano stool adjusted to suit Iturbi: "Wherever I put it, he don't like it. I have even measured the thing with a yardstick--bought the yardstick to do it--but still he don't like it."

Because Iturbi declared, during the Spanish Civil War, that his homeland needed "a strong man," he was picketed by U.S. leftists as a Fascist. Iturbi made his sympathies plain on last week's I am an American program:

"In Spain I was used to the immorally rich and the immorally poor; ... to what I called the 'outclass of society' . . . the people who, when I played in a movie house as a child to earn a living, after hours of constant work until two o'clock in the morning, came with objectionable women and made us run the whole show for them. . . . [They] in my opinion, in a very large part, kindled the revolution which cost thousands of lives, and gave the tragic opportunity for a dress rehearsal of the actual war."

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