Playing More Than Piano : Prodigy Works Hard on Keyboard but Doesn’t Let It Consume His Life

USC piano professor James Bonn remembers when Anders Martinson, then 14, wanted to become his private student. The boy called and said he wanted to play the difficult Brahms’ Paganini Variations for him.

When someone asks to play that particular piece, “You don’t hang up,” Bonn said. “It’s a formidable work, technically and musically. I said, ‘Please, I want to hear you.’ ”

When Anders, now 16, sits at the keyboard, the piano emits soulful adagios, spirited scherzos and whirling rhapsodies. “Brilliant,” “breathtaking,” “amazing for his age,” are how his musical elders describe his play.

Anders has captured first place at international piano competitions, played live on radio stations KCRW and KFAC, soloed with orchestras in Pasadena and Ventura and been invited to master classes with professional pianists. In March, he won $3,500 in a three-way tie for the Los Angeles Music Center’s Spotlight Award, which grants cash scholarships to young artists in Southern California. Anders and the other finalists performed before a panel of judges at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

His resume, which his father updates religiously on the home computer, lists awards, repertoire and performances. It is already four pages long.

“It’s scary, he’s so good,” said Betty Walsh, chairwoman of the music department at the private Crossroads School in Santa Monica, where Anders is a junior who has a nearly straight-A average.

But Anders is also the unassuming kid next door, who fits rock-hunting, tennis, basketball and Ping-Pong around a rigorous piano schedule. Three hours a day after school--six hours a day during the summer--he toils at a well-worn Baldwin grand piano at home, surrounded by the accouterments of his craft: tapes, an electric metronome, and stacks of music by Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Liszt, Prokofiev and Ravel.

Running through Chopin’s Scherzo Opus 20 in B minor--which he performed for the Spotlight competition--his head bows, his brow furrows. And his fingers fly. But after an hour, he breaks for 10 minutes of basketball at the back-yard hoop.

Anders took up piano at 6, at the same time as his brother Haldan, then age 8, started on the violin. Their Scandinavian father and Chinese mother had played the same instruments while growing up and figured music would be a wholesome pastime. Both sons have ended up prodigies.

At Crossroads School, Anders majors in music but also takes classes like calculus, natural science and Greek. Headmaster Paul Cummins said the school’s 650 other students “think he’s just another kid. Some know he plays piano, most probably don’t. Many don’t know how impressive (a musical talent) he is.”

When he’s not in class, Cummins said, Anders is likely to be found on the playground, playing basketball with other students. “It always makes me nervous for fear he’s going to sprain his fingers,” Cummins said.

Anders competes about twice a month and accompanies his older brother in violin competitions as well. Haldan, accompanied by Anders, was a winner in last year’s Spotlight contest, which led to a repeat performance on “The Tonight Show.”

Sometimes, Anders said, he enters competitions to win, but other times he does so simply for the “opportunity to perform” and “try out a piece.”

Despite more than 100 competitions and other concerts in the last five years, Anders is still a bundle of nerves before a performance.

“My stomach starts turning really fast. I won’t eat anything before, because it’ll come right out again.” He frets that he’ll forget the music.

Though piano dominates much of his life, Anders is not a one-dimensional music nerd. He isn’t planning to go to Julliard but to a “regular college” where he’ll be a music major. “I don’t want to be in an atmosphere where there’s nothing but people playing nothing but music all the time. . . . I just want to do other things also.”

A tour of his bedroom gives ample evidence of his diverse interests. It is home to a snake, a lizard, fish, a starling he found after a competition in Orange County, a dove, an octopus, sea anemones and dozens of hermit crabs from local tidepools.

The shelves are cluttered with sea urchins, crab shells, a piggy bank collection, soccer and school science fair trophies, souvenirs from Hong Kong--and the Spotlight trophy. He describes with excitement the family’s camping trip to New Mexico during spring break and the hours he spent digging to unearth two geodes.

“If I can become a concert pianist, I guess that’d be nice,” he said. “But there are a lot of good pianists out there--thousands across the country.

“Music is not the most important thing in the world; it’s just that that’s what I do well.”

For him, it is reward enough to know he has played well and to hear the applause of an appreciative audience. And sometimes, Anders gets more than applause from his audience.

After a recital last month of Beethoven’s “Eroica” variations, for example, “a person came up and said, ‘I was crying through the whole thing,’ ” Anders recalled. “And that made me feel good.”