Prodigies' Progress

For eight decades, Wunderkinder have come and gone since Arthur Ru binstein was recognized as a prodigy by the eminent violinist Joseph Joachim. All of them, no doubt, have had experience as tender as Rubinstein's:

"Professor Joachim picked me up from the floor, kissed me, and gave me a big piece of chocolate." For the great majority, however, the Japanese proverb has applied all too well: "The child prodigy at ten has talent at 15 and is mediocre at 20." Given parental idiosyncrasies, the denial of childish games, the pressures of concert life, it is a won der any of them survive at all. Yet they do. Beethoven, Mozart and Mendelssohn made it and, since Rubinstein's emergence, so have Violinist Yehudi Menuhin, Conductor Lorin Maazel and Pianist Lorin Hollander, among others. Three of the latest entrants in the prodigy sweepstakes:

LILIT GAMPEL: A wispy, delicate child who looks younger than her 13 years, Lilit is an astonishingly assured violinist who appeared as soloist last year with the New York Philharmonic and Seattle Symphony, was seen and heard two weeks ago on the Dick Cavett Show, and has just completed a recital tour of California, Washington and Utah. Home is a comfortable, bookish old Spanish house in Los Angeles. Father Leonard is a physicist, Mother Eva a biochemist; neither is a musician. Brother Alan, 9, much to Lilit's annoyance, is as dedicated to the drums as the piano ("He just bangs on anything").

Lilit is a straight-A student at Los Angeles' Lycee Franc,ais. She is also a regular visitor to the University of Southern California, where she takes a course in music theory and continues violin instruction with Alice Schoenfeld, her teacher since Lilit was 7 1/2. The proud possessor of a 1704 Stradivarius lent her by a Beverly Hills collector of fine musical instruments, Lilit practices one hour at 6:30 a.m., one hour after school, one hour just before bedtime --and professes not to mind it: "Practicing just makes me want to do it more." She has no close friends at school, partly because the other kids prefer rock to her Romantics: "My brother is my friend." Lilit does not feel that she has missed a thing by. concentrating almost exclusively on music. As she puts it, matter-of-factly: "You can't do everything."

LEANDRO ACONCHA: One day at his home in Fuengirola, Spain, when he was three, Leandro heard a tune on TV and asked his father to teach it to him. Papa Roberto, an ex-concert pianist from Colombia who had moved to Spain to go into real estate, led the boy to the piano, picked out the melody, and stood amazed as Leandro repeated it perfectly.

Today, at age six, Leandro is a pianistic sensation who has been applauded wildly from London to Lugano. Just as Rubinstein was taken to Joachim, so young Aconcha was taken to the venerable Rubinstein in 1970 at his vacation villa in Marbella, Spain. "Instead of hanging about the piano like a little monkey," chuckled Rubinstein shortly thereafter, "he ran about the house and hurtled through the garden." When the boy finally sat down to play, "not one note was missing. I was four when I started to play and he was three, but even at the age of eight I did not play as well as he does now."

Leandro has had only one instructor, his father. "I would like to be his teacher all my life but I realize I am dealing with an extraordinary talent," says Roberto. "When the time comes for me to hand him over to a conservatory I will hope to at least maintain my relationship with him as his best friend, as well as his father."

The conservatory will be in Switzerland, but not for a while. Leandro's parents (Mother Dora is a Swiss-born interior decorator) prefer to keep him in the Fuengirola elementary school (where his passion is arithmetic), and limit his concertizing to six weeks a year. The elder Aconchas think the boy needs that much exposure to obtain, says Roberto, "the psychological advantage of being used to an audience." Above all, they want to avoid exhibiting Leandro as a public curiosity. But, says Roberto, "he enjoys playing so much that he regards the concerts as a sort of holiday treat."

DYLANA JENSON: Yehudi Menuhin got down on his knees so he could be on her level when she played for him at age 6 1/2. Conductor Milton Katims told her stories and played games after her appearance with the Seattle Symphony. At age twelve, Dylana is a thoroughly natural child whom everybody seems to adore. Last week at the New York Philharmonic Promenades, where she appeared as violin soloist under Maestro Andre Kostelanetz, one of her concerns seemed to be to limit her smile so as to conceal the braces on her teeth. Despite a few nerve-induced intonation miscues, she played the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with sweep, dash and daring.

At this point in her career, Dylana Jenson is the happy product of what may be described as benevolent parental interference or, as her father Lee (a freelance writer in Van Nuys, Calif.) calls it, "maverick management." When Dylana (named after the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas) was eight and learning the Mendelssohn concerto, her teacher ruled that she was not ready to master the ricochet technique (bouncing the bow on the strings) required in the work. Her parents decided otherwise. "Dylana knew from listening to records of the concerto what was right and wrong," says her mother Ana, a former schoolteacher who takes care of Dylana, Brother Kevan, 14, Sister Vicky, 13, and Brother Ivan, 10, who is coming along nicely as a sculptor. The Jensens bought several books on violin technique, went to work with Dylana, and by the following week's lesson she was ricocheting like crazy.

These days, the only thing that annoys Dylana and her parents is chatter about her being the reincarnation of some great player of the past, or possessing a "miraculous gift of God." Says her mother: "If only they knew how hard that child works to do what she does."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.