Music: World’s Greatest

To the tune of $2,500. for which she played exactly 17 mm. 23 sec. in a General Motors broadcast from Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall. Pianist Ruth Slenczynski. 11. was launched last week on another U. S. season. Day before she had arrived from Europe wearing a red scarf and tarn her mother knitted, a grey coat which her father boasted had cost him “nearly $50.”’ Declared Father Slenczynski. never reluctant to talk: “I have been her only teacher.

. . . Sometimes when we go to concerts to hear other pianists -and great ones, too she gets nervous at the mistakes they make, and says to me ‘Oh, daddy, what would you say to me if I played like that?’ ‘ Father Slenczynski. who was shell-shocked during the War. has done much to make his talented young daughter seem horridly precocious. Like a Svengali he dictates her routine, eyes her sharply from the wings whenever she plays in concerts.

Prodigious Ruth, not half so bumptious as she looks, sees music simply. Her first heavy chord is impressively crashing in Beethoven’s Sonata Pathetique but to her it is just Beethoven’s father yelling “Get up !” to the boy whose practicing started at dawn. Father Slenczynski teaches young Ruth to say her prayers religiously. Be fore her conventional blessings, she asks God always “please, to make me the world’s greatest pianist.” Father Slenczynski thinks God has already answered his daughter’s prayer.