Coral Solomon, right, is in love…With her piano.
Solomon, 16, is a musical prodigy. She won first place at the 2008 Toronto Sinfonietta Concerto Competition, performed at Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto with the Sinfonietta and will be performing an hour-long solo concert in Israel later this winter.
“I really enjoy playing,” she said. “You obviously practise, but when you play, it’s kind of like singing. It just comes out.”
Solomon has been playing the piano since she was seven, but was exposed to it long before then, her mother, Lena, said.
“She started hearing music, I think since I was pregnant with her,” she said. “I would play [the piano] to her when she was inside, hoping that she will get to love it.”
And she has.
Rather than shop with friends and flip through TV channels, Solomon spends her free time practising. And practising and practising.
She plays around three hours a day, sometimes more if she can get in a half-hour before school.
“I put piano first,” she said. “School is a tight second, and friends come at the end. It’s really hard to accommodate school. I do get behind.”
Solomon is a Grade 11 student at Earl Haig Secondary School’s Claude Watson arts program. While her mother first started teaching her to play the piano, Solomon, who was born in Israel, began taking formal lessons when she was eight years old. When she immigrated to Canada with her family at the age of 11, she was accepted into the Royal Conservatory of Music’s Young Artist Performers Academy, where she’s now at the senior level.
For Solomon’s father, Emil, it was clear early on that his daughter had a connection with the piano.
“We’ve been told by a lot of people that she has a special musicality… [and] a great talent which is maybe bigger than others,” he said. “She’s feeling the music in a very special way.”
But piano hasn’t always been Solomon’s only passion. When she started high school, the pianist wanted to be an aerospace engineer.
“Originally, at the beginning of high school, I wanted to go into aeronautics engineering. That was my dream,” she said.
This dream changed in Grade 11. Now, Solomon is determined to become a professional pianist.
“I really like playing the piano. I think I do have the chance and the future [to play professionally],” she said.
Gennady Gefter, one of Solomon’s music teachers at Earl Haig, agrees.
“She’s a good pianist. She’s far above the average level. She’s very musical,” he said. “She loves music all together… she’s very comfortable with stage performance and has a very strong stage presence.”
Solomon will perform in Israel, in March 17, at the Open University of Israel in Tel Aviv, the next step in her musical career.
Solomon was invited to play at the university after her parents sent a recording of their daughter to the school.
She will be playing for a full hour, with no intermission. This isn’t anything new to the teen.
“[It’s] very hard to continuously play for an hour… You have to physically have enough endurance. Mentally, you have to stay focused until the end,” she said.
“You get so carried away with the excitement, you [don’t] feel like it was an hour. You just feel exhausted. If you played well, then it’s a good kind of exhausted.”
Solomon, whose favourite composers include Mozart and Liszt, has begun composing her own music. For the musician, writing music is about bursts of inspiration.
“I randomly get glimpses of whatever ideas. I go on the piano. I try to play around. I improvise. I try to collect [ideas] together… once I get that, I write it down,” she said.
While the musician has played the cello and clarinet, her favourite instrument is the piano.
“It depends on your personal feel for it. [The piano] feels right,” she said.
