Monday, Nov. 20, 1933
Prodigies
New Yorkers who went to Town Hall Monday night thought for a moment that they were being fooled. Programs told them that they would hear a Bach Prelude, the Chromatic Fantasio and Fugue, Beethoven's Pathetique sonata, Mendelssohn's Rondo Capricioso, six Chopin pieces. On the stage was a grand piano with a man-sized keyboard and to play it there appeared a chubby little girl who, if she had not been so self-possessed, would have looked as if she had wandered there by mistake on the way home from a children's party.
The little girl was Ruth Slenczynski, 8-year-old prodigy from Sacramento, Calif., who had just returned from three years in Europe. And when she had flipped up her dress, wriggled up on the stool and stretched down for the pedals, the audience knew that it had not been fooled at all. Her hands could barely span an octave but they sounded chords which were rich and strong. Beethoven's Pathetique needed more sweep than she could give it. Once in the Bach her right hand was not quite sure what her left hand was doing. But in the Mendelssohn and Chopin her fingers traveled over the keys with such speed and accuracy that the audience rushed forward for the encores to see just how she did it. Few people noticed a bald, dark-skinned little man who sat half-hidden behind the Town Hall organ watching her play her encores with Svengali-like intentness. He was her father who might have been a concert violinist if the War had not intervened. When Ruth was 2 he bought her a $10 toy piano. She wanted a "big one." He sold a diamond ring and got it for her. At 5 she had a repertoire of 200 pieces, could transpose them into any key. Josef Hofmann offered her a scholarship at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, but when he turned her over to an assistant Father Slenczynski packed her up and took her to Europe where he taught her himself, learning one piece after another just a jump ahead of her. Until she is bigger Father Slenczynski will allow her to play only a limited number of concerts, this season in Chicago, New Orleans, Washington, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Violin prodigies are much more common than piano prodigies, for small violinists can begin on small-sized instruments which fit their fingers. Louis Persinger, who taught Yehudi Menuhin and Ruggiero Ricci, has a violin pupil who created an unusual stir this week.
Gloria Perkins, 10, whose mother is a church organist in Queens Village, Long Island, and whose father, Clemmett Birdsong Perkins, is Eastern Passenger Agent for the Norfolk & Western Railway Co., played the Mendelssohn Concerto with the National Symphony in Washington. Gloria is a wispy little girl who wears big hair ribbons and oily black corkscrew curls. She took so long to tune her violin that the audience started to titter. But the feeling rapidly changed as the Concerto got under way. Gloria was not only technically expert but her playing had a simple persuasive quality that touched the audience deeply. Father and Mother Perkins are making a pianist of their son, Clemmett Birdsong Perkins Jr., 3.
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