Missouri Classical Music News and Notes

Once again, pianist Ruth Slenczynska is having a bout with limelight - this time at age 82, as opposed to age 5, when she entered the Curtis Institute of Music the year before making her Berlin debut.

"A musician is always a musician. We pop up somehow or another," she said the other day in her West End Avenue apartment. What she doesn't acknowledge is the odds she has overcome in doing so: Slenczynska has achieved several reincarnations within a single lifetime.

Currently, she's on a new VAI-label DVD titled Tribute to Rachmaninoff, half of it a Camera Three CBS-TV program she made in 1963, the other half a series of recent interviews. In them, she reminisces about her years of study with "Mr. Rachmaninoff," as she calls him, as well as her time at Curtis, when a fellow student nicknamed "the pen pusher" was writing something titled Adagio for Strings. And that was Samuel Barber.

These days, she's often in Japan, where since 2003 she has developed a late-life cult concert following. Along with that comes hobnobbing with Empress Michiko, recording new CDs, and, as a symbol of lively seniorhood, being photographed beneath a 1,200-year-old cherry tree for ads in the Japanese version of TV Guide.

None of that was forseeable as recently as 2000, when she was devastated by the death of her husband of 34 years, or in the decades previous, when she planned to retire at 40, and before that, renounced performing after a child-prodigy period in which she studied with now-legendary artists but suffered some of the worst backstage abuse on record.