Prodigy at 41

Violinist Ruggiero Ricci appeared on the stage at Carnegie Hall for the first time dressed in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit with flowing white bow tie and velvet kneepants. He was nine years old, and his hair flopped over his ears. With such classic equipment, he could scarcely have failed to make it as a prodigy--and he made it big. The more uninhibited critics, recalls Ricci. "called me the greatest violinist playing, which meant that I have had to fight Ricci ever since." Now 41, Ricci is still fighting Ricci. He seems to be doing nicely. During a lull in his frenzied concert career, he turned up in a Manhattan recording studio last week to cut two albums (for Decca). The fiddling was the kind that prodigious nine-year-olds can only envy.

Ricci was recording works by Pablo de Sarasate and a collection of compositions by one of his longtime admirers--Fritz Kreisler. who heard Ricci play as a child. Included were Sarasate's Malaguena and Zapateado, Kreisler's Liebesleid and Liebesfreud and La Gitana. Standing with a kind of Frank Sinatra slouch before the double microphones, tiny (5 ft. 4 in.) Violinist Ricci grasped his Guarnerius del Gesu fiddle in his short, square hands and produced a tone that was remarkable both for its control and its shading. He was at his best in the Sarasate Habanera and Jota Navarra--music that calls for the sort of flash and fire that have distinguished Ricci throughout his career. His admirers are drawn by the electric tension that sets him apart from two other famous San Francisco-trained prodigies--Isaac Stern and Yehudi Menuhin, who are closer to the rhapsodic Russians in their general style.

No Inhibitions. Although Ricci has never quite overtaken the early critical estimate of Prodigy Ricci, his performances have earned him an honored place among the world's best violinists. "After Oistrakh," remarked an astonished Moscow critic last spring, "Ricci was designed by nature to play the violin." Ricci himself gives part credit for his style to his "Latin descent," is embarrassed that his passport still identifies him as Woodrow Wilson Rich, a name he picked up at birth after his onetime-trombonist father had decided to Anglicize the family name. Woodrow Wilson was presented with his first violin when he was five. When he was eight, he was told that the old family name better suited a violinist; an alliterative Ruggiero was tacked on just to make the switch complete.

Looking back on his career as prodigy, Ricci feels that he was only going through the motions: "I don't care what they say about how beautifully a child plays; the child himself does not know what he's doing." Today Ricci feels that he went into a slump in his early teens. One trouble, he thinks, is that "as a child you have no inhibitions--you just do it. As you grow older, it's harder to be natural." Ricci was almost 20 before he learned to be natural once more.

Without Clothes. Nowadays, Ricci calls Switzerland his home, although he is rarely there. One of the most widely traveled concert artists ("If I wake up twice in the same bed, I think it is yesterday"), he departs this week, after 3 1/2 grueling days of recording, for a two-week tour of Scandinavia, plans an additional tour of South Africa and Europe before returning to the U.S. in January for a cross-country series of performances. He still suffers attacks of nerves when he returns to the familiar stage on which he appeared as a child 32 years ago. "I have a recurrent nightmare," says ex-Prodigy Ricci, "of showing up in Carnegie Hall without my clothes."

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