All Keyed Up : Two Orange County Siblings With Striking Piano Skills Prepare for Juilliard School

When he was 4 years old, he would sit at the piano and terrify his parents, his talent so out of sync with his cherubic face that it seemed supernatural.

Timidly, they brought him to a teacher well-known for her work with prodigies, hoping she could offer some guidance about special schools, some advice about coping with a precocious child.

After hearing the boy play an impassioned, powerful program, after watching him render a grand piano helpless with his tiny hands, the woman could utter only one word.

“Amadeus,” she said in an awe-struck rasp. “Amadeus.”

Seven years later, Arthur Abadi has alarmed thousands more people with his mature gifts, while disarming them with his wild mop of orange hair.

At 6 years old, he made his professional debut with a symphony orchestra.

At 7, he demonstrated for his composition teacher a “complete mastery” of the piano and an “exquisite, velvety touch” that performers five times his age would envy.

Now, for the lithe-fingered 11-year-old who plays Mendelssohn, Beethoven and Nintendo, the greatest test yet has arrived.

Fresh from performing a fiendishly complicated set of pieces Saturday night with the Pacific Symphony, he leaves for New York this week to attend the internationally renowned Juilliard School.

To finance his bright future, Marden and Debbie Abadi have drained their savings, sold their assets and mortgaged their condominium in Rancho Santa Margarita.

These are hectic, heady days for the Abadis. Between packing their house, counting their pennies and preparing to follow their son east, the former high school sweethearts sometimes stand in their kitchen looking stunned.

Over coffee, they whisper pianissimo about the boy in the next room, the boy who one conductor recently predicted would become “a musical giant of this century.”

But it is not just Arthur who worries them.

Arthur’s 8-year-old sister, Nomi, plays piano, too.

And she’s terribly, frighteningly good.

*

Long before Arthur was born, his mother saw his face.

Browsing in a museum gift shop, she glimpsed a copy of a famous Rembrandt, a portrait the artist had painted of his son.

On an impulse, Debbie Abadi bought the print and toted it home.

This is what our son is going to look like, she told her husband.

“She had a premonition,” Marden Abadi said, smiling at the portrait, which does indeed bear a vivid resemblance to pictures of the 4-year-old Arthur.

Debbie is a student of the fine arts, Marden is a music teacher and former concert pianist who gave several nationally televised recitals in honor of the U.S. bicentennial. (He also was a friend of the legendary pianist Artur Rubinstein, after whom Arthur is named.)

Together, they made it a goal to fill their home, and their infant’s ears, with the loveliest notes ever sounded in Western civilization, from Handel to Hank Williams.

The results were immediate.

When Arthur was 1, his parents took him for a daylong trip to Disneyland. One of the first things he did was glance over a footbridge and spy seven mechanical fish leaping in time to some tinny, recorded music.

Something about the music and the dancing fish fascinated him.

Repeatedly, his parents tried to coax him away, but he clung stubbornly to the bridge.

“He watched [the fish] until the park closed at night,” Marden Abadi said. “We couldn’t leave. . . . We spent the whole day at Disneyland on that stupid bridge, watching the fish. He was studying the fish.”

At 2, he was a rabid fan of opera, particularly the complex genius of Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi.

At 3, he was as thrilled to meet Mikhail Baryshnikov as most children are to meet Mickey Mouse.

When it was clear that Arthur needed some formal instruction on the piano, the Abadis were disappointed by every teacher they interviewed. So they resolved to become their son’s in-home instructors, training him in the Suzuki method, which stresses close listening, repetition and parental involvement.

They work hard with each child, six days a week, four hours a day. But they put more faith in genetics than practice. “A lot of what has happened in our lives is destiny,” Debbie Abadi said. “We’ve just intuitively followed along.”

*

“I won’t do good,” Nomi whimpers.

Her father urges her gently.

“Go on, Sweetie Pie,” he says. “Let’s hear the Mozart.”

She climbs onto the thickly cushioned leather piano bench, a piece of furniture twice her size, and scowls at the keys.

The piano is a $60,000 custom-built Steinway, 11 years in the making. Made by the same craftsman who supplied pianos to Rubinstein, it varies from the great master’s instrument in only a few small ways. Its keys are 25% lighter, to accommodate the Abadi children’s small, unfinished fingers.

Like a giant slab of obsidian, the piano sits in the middle of a lovely music room in the Abadi house, halogen lights winking off its creamy keys.

Though it seems a thing of beauty, Nomi perceives the piano at this moment as her jailer, a sentry standing between her and an hour’s fun on her Rollerblades.

“Is there any pedal on the second movement?” she says, sullen.

“No,” her mother says.

She kneads her hands.

She sniffles.

She slouches.

“The bench is a little low,” she says.

Her father jumps to his feet and adjusts the bench.

Finally, when the mood is just right, she turns to the piano and lifts her hands.

The first clear, bright notes of a Bach invention fill the house, played with sharp, mathematical precision. Next comes a brooding Chopin waltz, followed by the second movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in E-flat, which Marden says Mozart wrote when he was 10.

“Nine,” Nomi corrects him.

(In fact, scholars are unsure when the concerto was written.)

The sound is gorgeous, the timing confident. Notes gurgle, then sparkle, as Nomi works up and down the keyboard.

When she is finished, she flashes a devious grin and folds her hands in her lap. Her parents applaud, pronouncing the performance splendid.

Nomi debuted professionally with the Orange County Chamber Orchestra when she was 5, but she prefers astonishing classmates to playing for sold-out concert halls.

Arthur, who watches Japanese horror movies while his sister plays, now follows her to the piano.

He, too, rubs his hands and fidgets. But his face bears a seething intensity rare for children. After a few deep breaths, he begins.

He pets the keys. He pounds the keys. He appears relaxed, but focused, as if balanced between a mindless game and strenuous work.

Melodic, then moody, the music was composed by the great masters, some of it centuries before Arthur’s birth.

Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1.

Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C-minor.

Mozart’s Sonata in A.

Schubert’s Impromptu in A-flat.

He describes playing the piano as a compulsion, something he enjoys and studies with a ferocity that comes naturally.

With a thumping rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner,” he is finished practicing for the night. He turns to face his parents, who shower his performance with praise, and a proud smile spreads his freckles wider across his nose.

Though Nomi flirts with notions of becoming a doctor or an artist, Arthur vows to be a professional musician.

“I’m going to be a pianist,” he says simply. “I’m going to have the power of Rubinstein, the fast octaves of [Vladimir] Horowitz, the softness of [Walter] Gieseking.”

*

Nomi confesses that she got teary-eyed when Wilbur cried at the end of the movie, but she still prefers romantic and baroque masterpieces to sentimental children’s musicals such as “Charlotte’s Web.”

Her practice sessions, like Arthur’s, are strictly confined to those compositions she will play for a jury of Juilliard experts next month. The New York audition is expected to be a formality because both children already impressed a Juilliard panel in Aspen last summer.

“They are unusual,” said Herbert Stessin, former chairman of the Juilliard piano department, who heard the Abadi children in Aspen. “Based on the audition, they’re quite high on the scale.”

But how high he cannot speculate.

Nomi would not be the youngest student ever to attend Juilliard, he noted, and whether Arthur will be on a par with his famous namesake is difficult to gauge until Juilliard teachers have spent hours watching him work.

An Orange County expert who has worked closely with the Abadi family says the children are a force with which the music world must reckon.

“I know a lot of professionals, very good professionals, who don’t play with [their] level of control and sound,” said Greg Dempster, a composition teacher who has taught Arthur and Nomi for several years. “I have no category in which to classify these two kids. Certainly, in my experience of teaching, I can say categorically, I have learned more from teaching them than they have ever learned from me.”

Sometimes, Dempster said, Arthur does more than impress. He leaves a listener breathless.

One occasion stands out in particular.

At 6 years old, Arthur happened to hear the Pacific Symphony rehearse an early Mozart symphony. He had never heard the piece before, and he adored it. When the time came for his next lesson, he simply could not stop talking about Mozart.

I heard the most wonderful symphony, he told Dempster.

Then he sat down and played it.

“He had never heard it before!” Dempster said. “My mouth dropped open. I couldn’t talk for a couple of minutes. I walked out, closed the door and went and said to his mother, ‘Do you know who’s in the other room?’ ”

In fact, Debbie Abadi says, she sometimes wonders.

But she never doubts that it is someone special. “I knew when he was born,” she said, standing in the kitchen with Marden, an hour after the children have finished practicing. “I just knew.”

“I’ve done this my whole life,” Marden said. “I’ve worked with children, I’m a professional pianist myself. But there’s a limit. There are things that go beyond any expectation.”

He points toward the music room, where the gleaming piano still seems to emit a low hum.

“There’s no way you can teach somebody to do anything like that.”