Teen Pianist Unlocks The Keys

Prodigy Makes Music His Life

By Jonathan Mummolo (Contact)

Saturday, April 26, 2008

His two pet parakeets chirping nearby, 14-year-old John Chen slowly positioned himself at the Steinway grand piano in his Lovettsville living room before school Thursday morning.

He remained still for several seconds, his fingers and feet poised to embark on a three-movement Beethoven sonata that Chen described as a rumination on the great master’s descent into deafness.

“The third movement is very fast and agitated,” said the pudgy-cheeked prodigy, whose curly, messy hair somewhat resembles Beethoven’s. “It seems to me that Beethoven is very angry he’s going deaf.”

What was Beethoven thinking — or, more important, feeling? Why does he move from a minor to a major key in the second movement? These are the matters Chen contemplates while most teenagers his age are at the mall, or playing Xbox 360.

To Chen, whose instructor at the Juilliard School calls him “a born virtuoso,” perfecting a piece of music is far more than a technical exercise or a matter of muscle memory. It’s an expression of human experience, one he tries deeply to convey each time he plays, despite the few years he has to draw on.

On May 10, Chen — who has performed at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center, as well as at assisted living communities and homeless shelters — will deliver his third annual benefit concert at the Loudoun Country Day School. The proceeds will go to the scholarship fund that helped pay his own tuition at the private school before he graduated last year.

The two-hour performance will include works by Chopin, Beethoven, Debussy and Rachmaninoff. Chen has promised to continue holding the yearly concert “forever . . . because I feel like the kids aren’t exposed to classical music enough.”

Not everyone has appreciated exposure to Chen’s talents. He and his mother, Litong Yang, were forced out of their Tysons Corner apartment three years ago after neighbors complained about his noisy playing.

“I’m practicing piano seven to 10 hours a day,” he said. “For other people, it must be very annoying.”

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John Chen, a 14-year-old piano prodigy, and his mother Li Tong Yang talk about his long practice hours in Lovettsville on April 24, 2008. (Tracy A. Woodward)

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John Chen, 14, with his Steinway piano in Lovettsville on April 24, 2008. (Tracy A. Woodward)

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John Chen, 14, practices on his Steinway piano in Lovettsville on April 24, 2008. (Tracy A. Woodward)

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John Chen, 14, practices on his Steinway piano in Lovettsville on April 24, 2008. (Tracy A. Woodward)

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Shortly after a Washington Post columnist wrote about Chen’s housing woes, a family in Lovettsville offered to take in the young pianist and his mother at a secluded house in the woods. They now live rent-free in an apartment above the home’s three-car garage, with no one around to complain if Chen plays loudly.

And he does. He had to replace his Steinway with a larger one in November — one better able to withstand his thunderous pounding.

“The previous one — I kept breaking all the strings,” he said.

A student at Notre Dame Academy in Middleburg, Chen also attends an elite pre-college program at Juilliard. Each Friday, he and his mother drive five to six hours to the music school in Manhattan.

On the long drive, he takes in some reading — he’s currently in the middle of “War and Peace.”

But when home, he does little besides practice piano, bent on achieving his goal of becoming “a great concert pianist.”

“I don’t really take breaks, because I practice piano when I come home from school,” he said. “Then I eat dinner and practice more piano, and basically dinner’s my break. And also sometimes I practice piano in the morning, and school will be my break.”

On Thursday, he was up at 6 a.m. to begin practice. He tackles pieces methodically, his mother said — section by section, movement by movement, and commits them to memory.

His routine sometimes worries his mother, who has sacrificed everything for her son’s gift since he arrived in the United States in 1999 from Beijing.

“I say, ‘Do some other things. Keep the piano as an interest and study another major. You don’t have to spend all your life on this. . . . You’re going to get married, you’re going to have children, you’re going to have a wife, a family.’ ” But Chen will not be deterred, and he is quick to reference the lives of other great pianists in defense of his practice habits.

“He said, ‘I don’t get it. [Vladimir Davidovich] Ashkenazy and so many others, they have plenty of children, they have a family, they still play concerts,’ ” his mother said.

Matti Raekallio, a Finnish-born concert pianist and Chen’s instructor at Juilliard, said the boy’s greatness stems from the combination of an innate ability to unlock technical puzzles, a deep respect for music and a diligent approach to his studies.

“It is unusual for a 14-year-old boy to play all the 24 Chopin Etudes the way John does,” Raekallio wrote in an e-mail. “His ear-hand-connection works fabulously well. He has a very quick intellect, enabling him to grasp effortlessly the structure of the large-scale works that he studies. . . . What I like perhaps the most about him is the unaffected seriousness with which he approaches music and his work.”

Chen’s rare talent was also apparent to officials at his former school, who adjusted his class schedule to allow him to travel and rehearse.

“It is often the case that with the kinds of families and children who come to our school that there’s just a lot of talented kids in the community,” said Loudoun Country Day’s headmaster, Randy Hollister. “And we’ll often hear, ‘This child really excels at this or that.’ You hear that kind of thing frequently. Then when you encounter a talent of this magnitude — it’s really something.”

It’s a talent Chen has been developing since he was 4 years old, when his grandmother in Beijing unlocked the instrument for him — literally.

“There was a piano in the apartment, and I wanted to play it, but it was locked,” he said. “So my grandma unlocked it for me, and I played a few notes, and I liked it. I loved it right away.”

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