(You need to Login or Register to view media files and links)benjamin, kit and alex are featured in this section of the forum. the author forgot to include joe hay!!  'At three he was reading the Wall Street Journal'
Jennifer, Benjamin, Kit and Alex have flourishing classical careers - and the oldest is just 15. What will happen when they grow up, asks Stephen Moss
Thursday November 10, 2005
The Guardian
It is one of the paradoxes of classical music that, in a world where artists can still have a great career in their 80s, we are so hung up on prodigies. Menuhin, Kissin, Barenboim, Anne-Sophie Mutter - all superstars by the age of 13 - were forced to grow up in public. All classical musicians who have solo careers are in some sense prodigies. "I started playing at four, as all concert pianists do," the pianist and musicologist Charles Rosen once casually told me. It's just that some of them display their gifts on stage sooner than others. But what's the point? What does a 12-year-old have to say about a Beethoven piano sonata or a Brahms violin sonata?
Before I had met the four British-based prodigies featured here - pianists Benjamin Grosvenor and Kit Armstrong, violinist Jennifer Pike and composer/singer Alex Prior - I was fervently opposed to child performers. My instinctive suspicion was fed by a recent book on the American violinist Michael Rabin - feted as a teenager, in emotional free-fall in his 20s, dead at 35. Great classical musicians should be planets, not meteors; careers built steadily, stealthily. A violinist, bowing arm permitting, can last 40 years; a pianist 60. When you are 12, don't play Carnegie Hall, play football.
So much for the theory. I cling to vestiges of it, but have to admit it was largely exploded the moment I heard 13-year-old Kit Armstrong play the first two movements of Beethoven's Pathétique sonata at an assessment at the Royal Academy of Music. His playing was so cultured, his joy in performing (for an audience of three: his mother May, the assessor and me) so obvious, his commitment as he stretched his small frame to reach the low notes so total, that my objections seemed mean-spirited. If he wanted to perform - he already has a decent career in his native US and is now taking engagements in Europe - why not?
Kit is a mathematical as well as a musical genius. When he is not studying piano and composition at the Royal Academy, he is taking maths classes at Imperial College. The son of a Chinese mother and an English father, with whom he has never had contact, he gave up conventional schooling at five. "At three he was reading the Wall Street Journal and Business Week," explains May, a former Wall Street broker, "and before he turned five he had already finished high school maths. He's not conventional. How would a traditional educational system fit him? It just won't. We tried many different things, different schools, and it got to the point where it was really way too easy and not stimulating."
He performs widely in the US and is starting to build a career in Europe, but his agent, Jilly Clarke at Askonas Holt, insists it will be taken very slowly. "We have to be extremely careful with him," she says. "We are in some ways acting as guardians. He wants to perform and already does so in the US, but here people are more cautious about hearing very young people. He is in it for the long term and so are we. We don't want it to interfere with his education and are not looking to make lots of money out of Kit Armstrong now. We will act as facilitators, introducing him to conductors and artists he can work with."
Benjamin Grosvenor is also 13 but, thanks to a sensational performance in the 2004 BBC Young Musician of the Year final when he played Ravel's Concerto in G, is better known in the UK than Armstrong. Though his mother is a piano teacher, he started playing at the relatively late age of six and a half and has been performing since he was eight. Last month he gave a concert at the Albert Hall and, on the day I met him, was appearing on Richard and Judy to publicise it.
He gives around 18 concerts a year - usually in three clusters of six. He practises for up to five hours a day and has to fit the pianism alongside his education at Westcliff High School for Boys, though he has been allowed to drop subjects to allow for practice time. As well as the enjoyment he derives from performing, he sees building a career now as having advantages. "People will get to know my name and then they'll come to think, 'Oh yes, Benjamin Grosvenor, let's go to his concerts.'" Playing the piano professionally is an extremely competitive business. The number of conservatory students who go on to have solo careers is tiny, and getting the "brand" established can pay dividends.
Christopher Elton, head of the keyboard department at the Royal Academy, who teaches Grosvenor and is also closely involved with Armstrong, has no qualms about them performing for the public as long as they are not turned into "circus acts" - the stock term of abuse for musical prodigies who, like Mozart in the 18th century and Menuhin in the 20th, are touted around by grasping parents.
"Concerts must be carefully programmed, they mustn't do too many, mustn't interrupt their study and there should be no compunction," says Elton, "but having a stage career at a young age is not dangerous in itself. It's the most natural thing in the world for Ben to perform; it's what he works towards."
Others are less convinced. "I'm not keen on the word prodigy," says Nicolas Chisholm, headmaster of the Yehudi Menuhin School. "It's from the Latin prodigium, meaning monster. I don't think it is a good idea for young people to be exposed to the pressure of performing, because there's always a danger that the audience will see a performing monkey rather than a musician. Yehudi Menuhin set this school up to prevent kids being exploited in the way he had been. He was performing at the age of five and was under huge pressure. Our view here at the school, following the Menuhin philosophy, is why hurry? Music is a communication medium and you've got to have something to communicate."
Rosemary Pickering, chief executive of the Young Concert Artists Trust, which looks after young musicians, echoes the point. "You need to bring life's experiences to your music making. If you are 12 and you play a huge Romantic concerto, it's difficult to believe you can make the same impact as someone older." Pickering is in an ambiguous position - she gets engagements for promising young artists but seems doubtful whether the very young should even be starting a performing career. "If it was my child, I would discourage it," she says. "It's abnormal." She squares the circle by working with young musicians who are just reaching maturity and by avoiding overtaxing them with too many engagements.
The Young Concert Artists Trust represents violinist Jennifer Pike, who won the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition in 2002, and Pickering offers Pike's progress as a model to follow. Study at a music school - Pike is at Chetham's in Manchester, where her father is head of composition - and develop a performing career gradually. Aim to establish yourself as a musician rather than sell yourself as a prodigy.
Pike, an articulate and engaging 15-year-old, is not happy with the P-word. "It's very flattering to be called a prodigy," she says, "but I can't help imagining a three-year-old with a box of tricks. Being labelled a prodigy can be a curse. It can be dangerous because it's not about the music; it's about business and hype." She doesn't yet have a record deal, but says she was approached by a company that wanted her to record crossover material. She turned them down. "It's dangerous because you can get roped into a lot of things," she says. "I want to play classical music."
Fellow violinist Chloë Hanslip did have a record deal, signed with great hurrahs with Warner Classics in 2001 when she was 13. It was presented as a five-disc deal, but she was unceremoniously dropped two years and two discs later because sales hadn't met expectations. Rejection at 15! Her career is still ticking along nicely (she and Pike will be performing the Bach Double Concerto together next April) but it must have been a blow. Chloë didn't want to be interviewed for this article - at 18 she sensibly wants to move the emphasis away from her youth - however in a brief phone conversation she did say that being labelled a prodigy had been a "millstone".
Alex Prior is 12 and styles himself the "world's youngest tenor". He lives in a mansion flat in St John's Wood, London, with his Russian mother and British father. There must be pots of family money because he has produced a disc called Just a Boy and hired a PR company to publicise it. While admiring the ambition, the disc is lamentable - so bad that even Classic FM has refused to play it. Prior's voice may mature into something less strained - a 12-year-old tenor really is a contradiction in terms - but my guess is that his true metier is composing. He has already composed more than a hundred pieces and shows outrageous promise.
He is prodigious in other ways, too: he is trilingual (English, Russian and French), plays numerous instruments and uses words that no self-respecting 12-year-old should know. As he told me: "I don't mind dissonance but it's not something that I use a lot; I call myself a neo-Romantic, basically." He attends an ordinary school and fitting in is a problem.
"The word prodigy always worries me," says his doting mother, Elena. "I feel a prodigy might not grow into an artist, and I believe my son would. I don't want people to say that he's good now because he's young. I think he can have a career for life. Also, we want him to be among children; we don't want him to grow up being a loner. On the other hand, when it comes to practicalities, music tuition at school is too simple. His interests are a little bit apart. He doesn't want to play football in the break, he goes and does organ. It is difficult. We ask ourselves what is best for him, but he is pushing us towards music, which is a bit scary because no one knows how it will work out, no matter how much talent you have. But if you didn't believe, nothing would happen." "I'm an optimist, an ultra-optimist," chimes in Alex. "I think every musician has to be an ultra-optimist."
It's a high-stakes game. "Prodigies are seen by society as being different," says Stephen Thomas, director of the National Association of Gifted Children, "and the danger is they will see themselves as being different and react against that. There can be a backlash and many prodigies do not go on to realise their ambitions. As well as intellectual stimulation, they need social and emotional support. Young people are children first. They have social and emotional needs, and they must be in balance if the individual is to achieve his or her potential"
· Jennifer Pike gives her debut recital at Wigmore Hall, London W1, on November 15. Box office: 020-7935 2141. (You need to Login or Register to view media files and links)
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