How many highly-polished instruments he [Anton Rudinstein] has irretrievably ruined by allowing his cigarettes to burn long corrugated grooves in their surface whilst he has been wrestling with extemporised difficulties of his own imagining, I will not venture even to surmise. At such times, however — when the rosewood is slowly calcining and emitting a pungent scent that, as I have more than once noticed, exercises a painfully depressing influence upon the spirits of the suffering pianoforte's owner — Rubinstein plays with a passionate vigour, intensity of feeling, and subtlety of intorprotaticm that arc peculiarly his own.