There are many ways you may be familiar with John Rubinstein: as the Tony, Drama Desk, and Theatre World award–winning Broadway actor whose numerous credits include starring in the original production of Children of a Lesser God and creating the title role in the Bob Fosse–directed production of Pippin, or as the Emmy-nominated actor who starred in such TV shows as Family and Crazy Like a Fox. You may know him as the versatile film actor who’s appeared in such movies as Being the Ricardos, Red Dragon, 21 Grams, and Someone to Watch Over Me or as the composer of several film and TV scores, including ones for China Beach and the Robert Redford movie The Candidate. You may know him as the host of the radio program Carnegie Hall Tonight or as the narrator of more than 200 audiobooks, including ones by such best-selling authors as Agatha Christie, James Patterson, Jonathan Kellerman, and Carl Hiaasen. Or you may know him as a longtime Festival collaborator.
Rubinstein—the son of pianist Arthur Rubinstein and a graduate of UCLA and Juilliard, where he studied theater and music and then composition, respectively—first appeared at the Festival in 1995, when he narrated the “play with music” Through Roses, which Marc Neikrug, who’s served as the Festival’s Artistic Director since 1998, wrote over the course of 15 months in 1979 and 1980. Next summer, on August 13, Rubinstein returns to the Festival to reprise his role in a production that he also directs and that features an ensemble of eight Festival musicians conducted by Neikrug.
Through Roses was commissioned by the 92nd Street Y in New York City and premiered at London’s Southbank Centre in August 1980. Since then, it’s been performed hundreds of times around the world and translated into many languages, and it’s been turned into a film by theater and opera director Jürgen Flimm that stars Oscar winner Maximilian Schell.
Through Roses tells the story of a violinist and Holocaust survivor who, several decades later, is coming to terms with his memories of, and experiences at, Auschwitz, where he was forced to perform for the Nazis who imprisoned him. In addition to the work’s heartrending subject matter, Through Roses stands out for its unusual and innovative form—which, Neikrug once told The New York Times, “came first. I was looking for a way to get theater and music together,” he said, “so that music would be crucial—a subtext—to the spoken word.”
While Through Roses’ violinist, whom Rubinstein gives voice to, is a fictional character, his ordeal is based in fact. Neikrug is a celebrated pianist as well as a composer, and in that same Times interview, he noted that once, when he was performing in London, he “heard a story about a cellist who was ordered to play Bach in Auschwitz—while inmates were marched to the gas chambers.” Through Roses’ plot led to Neikrug integrating his own music with the kind the violinist would have likely played for his jailers. “At relevant points in the drama,” Neikrug wrote in a program note, “[the score includes] fragments of military marches and popular songs as well as Haydn . . . Beethoven, Paganini, Wagner, Berg, Mozart, Schubert, and Bach.”
In addition to performing Through Roses in 1995, Rubinstein narrated the work during the Festival’s 2008 season. Over the decades, he’s also appeared in Festival productions of Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat, Saint-Saëns’s The Carnival of the Animals, Neikrug’s Death Row Memoirs of an Extraterrestrial, and, most recently, in 2018, Walton’s Façade. For next summer’s August 13 performance, Rubinstein is joined by violinist Martin Beaver, violist Steven Tenenbom, cellist Felix Fan, flutist Tara Helen O’Connor, Cleveland Orchestra Principal Oboist Frank Rosenwein, clarinetist Carol McGonnell, percussionist Colin Currie, and pianist Katia Skanavi.
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