(Jorge Bolet | 1974 | Live) Rubinstein: Etude in C major, Op.23 No.2 (Staccato) 

1970-74 was the period when Jorge Bolet's career began to take a significant upward turn (and this recital on 25 February 1974 in Carnegie Hall seems to have been the coping stone). John Gruen interviewed JB for The New York Times, Sunday, 28 January, 1973, and he gives a marvellous character sketch. ‘To sit in a desperately cheerful New York hotel room with Jorge Bolet is to know the meaning of absolute contradiction. The Cuban-born pianist is simply too imposing and disquieting a figure to meld easily with screaming red-and-orange curtains, and wildly patterned bedspreads... He demands a far more austere setting, possibly a sombre Buñuel set with dark, musty wall-hangings, shadows, chandeliers, sinister rugs... In a way he recalls characters out of Poe and Hawthorne. ' In a feature on 18 January, 1976, Mary Rorich, in The Sunday Times (Johannesburg) wrote: 'You couldn't paint American pianist Jorge Bolet in watercolours or inks. You'd have to use oils, -dark, sombre colours, thickly applied - and make the picture a little larger than life. Because that's how he is. He has the air of well-being of a South American coffee tycoon.'