Fourteen-year-old Nathan Ben-Yehuda said he wants a career as a concert pianist and his piano teacher believes he has what it takes.
By Melonie Magruder / Special to The Malibu Times
Nathan Ben-Yehuda may be only 14 years old. But when it comes to his first piano performance at Carnegie Hall in New York City, scheduled for next week, he knows what he has to do.
“I am scheduled to play Liszt’s ‘Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6,'” the blonde teen with the cherubic smile said. “But I needed something to really knock their socks off, so I learned some Chopin as well.”
Ben-Yehuda is an independent-study student at Malibu High School and has been playing piano since age four. He was recently chosen by Julliard professor Julie Jordan to perform as a featured soloist, along with several top Julliard alumni (most with a decade or more on him), at the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, as well as in performances at Steinway Hall and Klavierhaus.
His upcoming recitals were arranged after a session last summer at the Ithaca School of Music in upstate New York. After hearing Ben-Yehuda play, Jordan booked him for the Julliard recital. But the young pianist demurs at the label “prodigy.”
“I learned to love classical music from listening to my mom play,” Ben-Yehuda said. “She hooked me up with my teacher, Deborah Aitken, and I’ve been playing ever since.”
Though well schooled in the Romantic and Baroque eras of classical music, the teenager prefers what he calls Contemporary Classical, beginning with compositions published by Debussy and Bartok in the late 19th century.
“I just love the modern composers like Villa-Lobos (an early 20th century Brazilian composer) and Debussy,” Ben-Yehuda said. “Their chord progressions fed into a lot of jazz, which is very free-form.”
Ben-Yehuda’s mother, Susan Holley, said she realized early on that her son had an affinity for classical music.
“I knew he had something when he heard me playing (Beethoven’s) ‘Moonlight Sonata’ and really seemed to like it,” Holley said. “He wasn’t even five, but he asked me to play it again and then asked me to teach it to him. Well, he wasn’t reading music yet, so he would play stuff by ear. I told him it might be a little advanced, but he memorized it almost instantly.”
Aitken, who has been teaching Ben-Yehuda since he was four, is usually cautious about taking very young students.
“Sometimes, parents want their kids to start lessons earlier than when they’re ready,” she said. “I started Nathan off by tapping out rhythms for him that became increasingly complex. He was able to duplicate them easily.”
In fact, she didn’t begin teaching her new student to read music for several months. Instead, she had him move or hop to different rhythms she gave him.
“I even got him to make up sound effects or stories on the piano,” Aitken explained. “It got his ear ready very early on. My object was to free him from the keyboard.”
Ben-Yehuda progressed so rapidly that he was starting to think about music conservatories at a young age, eventually deciding that he wants to attend The Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
“It’s not as well-known as Julliard,” he said. “But it’s the best for pianists.”
Ben-Yehuda said he likes to improvise and compose on the keyboard, but that he never seems to write things down. While classical music is his “whole universe,” he likes to relax by playing in his indie-rock band, Cracked Crown. He plays guitar.
“I’m only a moderately good guitarist, but I write all the music,” he said. “My drummer, Austin Eldridge, is a totally great drummer and I have this bassist, Elijah Rohling, who never practices, but he’s a great musician.”
Ben-Yehuda insists there are great similarities between classical composition and indie-rock tunes.
“When you sit down to write, the basic chord progressions are the same,” he said. “You have a distorted guitar that gives shadings. Our influences are ’60s psychedelic music like Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd. We’re very experimental. Like the ideas for abstract components and chord progressions that Debussy had in his first ‘Images’ suite.”
Ben-Yehuda said he wants a career as a concert pianist and Aitken believes he has what it takes.
“Nathan definitely has the equipment,” Aitken said. “But every career demands certain traits from its performers. Some people just can’t stand the anxiety inherent in performing. Nathan seems to be OK with that.”
For his part, Ben-Yehuda allows that he’s a “little nervous” about playing with other Julliard students.
“But this is my career,” he said. “I’ll get used to it.”