Recording of the Week, Ruth Slenczynska and a Life in Music

Earlier in the year, looking back on the career of the late Francis Jackson, I was struck by the direct links he had to earlier generations of musicians – people who we tend to regard as already untouchably distant historical figures, chiefly Edward Bairstow. Today’s Recording of the Week, featuring 97-year-old pianist Ruth Slenczynska, represents even more profound connections with near-legendary names from the past, bringing them closer to us and reminding us of the easily-forgotten fact that even the most revered icons were real people once.

The immediacy of the past is made clear in the album’s accompanying notes – Slenczynska wears, to this day, a necklace given to her by her teacher Sergei Rachmaninov. Listening to her performance his Daisies and his Prelude in G major, her enviable closeness to the musical mind of the Russian piano colossus is less apparent in the playing itself (which is of course sensitive and assured, but could hardly be expected to create magical séance-like epiphanies) and more in the imagination of the listener. There is a sense almost of awe in hearing these performances alongside reading Slenczynska’s personal reminiscences of time spent in Rachmaninov’s company.

Alongside her studies with Rachmaninov, a friendship developed with Samuel Barber, whose profound advice to seek beauty over technical brilliance Slenczynska recalls as having exerted a lifelong influence on her music-making. In her account of Chopin’s Grande valse brillante the deep wisdom of this approach is especially clear. No amount of technique, however polished, can fully compensate for over nine decades of wear and tear on the tendons and joints of the fingers, and Slenczynska’s tempo here perhaps reflects a partial concession to this reality – but the beauty of her musicianship is undiminished, and indeed her adoption of a hint of the lilting Viennese Lift here and there shows her to be no less thoughtful a performer today than when she was recording the work for American Decca in the 1950s.

It was as a Chopin pianist that Slenczynska primarily made a name for herself. Recounting in passing the terrifying story of a father who demanded she play through all twenty-four Études before breakfast each day, she devotes about half of the album in total to Chopin, in performances that serve to re-emphasise the same qualities that had endeared her to listeners decades earlier. Last year, Gramophone said of the Complete American Decca Recordings box-set that it showed “her rhythmic acuity, razor-sharp precision in chord playing and rapid passagework, and an unerring grasp of structure”, and those same characteristics are still audible here.

Another near-legendary name who appears as a supporting character in Slenczynska’s astonishing story is Alfred Cortot, from whom she seems to have drawn several insights. In a particularly wry remark that may resonate with long-suffering music teachers around the world, she notes that his lack of practice left him with a “horrible” technique but that his poetry at the piano outshone these limitations. Cortot’s admonition to “never play anything twice the same way” seems to have borne particular fruit in her wonderfully relaxed and fluid account of Debussy’s La fille aux cheveux de lin. Many renditions of this work allow themselves to become over-indulgently yearning and impassioned, but Slenczynska seems at pains to preserve the watercolour delicacy of the music – and the performance is the better for it. Encounters with further historical greats ensue; with Vladimir Horowitz, at whose funeral Slenczynska performed Chopin’s Prelude in F, and with Egon Petri, whose passing-on of his interest in Bach is represented by nimble accounts of the Prelude and Fugue in C#, BWV848 – though I can’t help wondering whether he would wholly have approved of some of her cheekier moments of rubato!

The abiding impression left by these handful of pages from Slenczynska’s extensive musical biography is one of being on “first-name terms” with history – not with Rachmaninov but with Sergei, not with Barber but with Samuel. And yet the album is far more than merely a means for us to feel nearer to the past; in just sixty-eight minutes of music Ruth Slenczynska shows herself to be a musician as sensitive and thoughtful today as she was in 1956 at the outset of her recording career.