Pianist Likes Cooking

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31984, 10 May 1969, Page 14

Pianist Likes Cooking

Stanislas Niedzielski, the celebrated Polish pianist, is a man with a iking for dogs and good French cooking.

His world tours hindered the first but gave rise to the second, he said in Christchurch yesterday. “Agricultural and veterinary regulations won’t allow me to bring my dog with me and so when the one I had on my first two tours of this country in 1968 and 1861 died, I resisted the temptation to get anomer,” he Mid. “But travelling round the world asl do I find that one can’t always find the best restaurants or else it is too late to get to them after a performance so 1 have'taken up cooking which I find an entertaining and relaxing subject “Six years ago I studied it seriously at the Cordon Bleu school in Paris, where I iive, and now when I go back to a hotel or motel after a performance and I, am too excited to sleep, yet too tired to read, I may prepare a good sauce or some other dish ” he said. “I particularly dislike Chinese cooking but I find very plain Spanish cooking very good. I have a saying that in England you get tile best food where the man serving you is wearing a white tie, whereas in Spain it is where he spits on the floor.”

There were two things about New Zealand food he did not like, he Mid. One was that he could not get as good New Zealand lamb here as he could in London, and the other that he could not get enough rainbow trout He Mid also that New Zealand crayfish were now lacking in quality. “You take off the tail and freeze it and that kills any flavour. It is beyond assistance from even a good sauce. Mass production and the export drive very often spoils the best food," he said. Often cited as one of the last pianists of the romantic school, Mr Nledsielski was born only IS miles from Chopin’s birthplace and wu one of Paderewski's six pupils. His concert tonight will be

a Chopin Recital, including the Sonata in B Minor, Preludes Op. 28, Eight Studies, Ballade in F Major, Scherzo in B Flat Minor, Tarantella and Mazurka. With the exception of the sonata it is the same programme he played for President Nixon and a small group of Mr Nixon’s colleagues before the latter left for Europe In February. The New Zealand public was one of the quietest he had ever come across in the world, he Mid. They were however, too often tied to television sets and only went to concerto when given free tickets by a major corporation.

“I would not go so far as to My that this free-ticket

business by such things as the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation is prostitution of music, but it does not do anything to develop appreciation in the public,” he said.

He will perform the concert on his own piano, a concert grand by Gaveau of Paris, which he tows in a special trailer behind his car on all his tours.

“Perhaps you had better tell the public that if they see me limp on to the stage it is not because of old age, but because I dropped one of the doors of the trailer on my foot in Gisborne. It fractured the big toe and, although that was six weeks ago, it still hurts," he Mid.