IF YOU GO
WHAT: Solo piano concert
WHO: Vikram Potdar
WHEN: 7:30 to 8:30 tonight
WHERE: Chapel Hill High School auditorium
TICKETS: $7 for adults and $5 for students and can be purchased at the venue before the event
CHECK OUT THE SHOW
Vikram's performances can be viewed on YouTube.com using the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEpYHWMXWD0
By Dan E. Way
dway@heraldsun.com
CHAPEL HILL -- It doesn't take long in conversation with Vikram Potdar to realize the 17-year-old East Chapel Hill High School senior has a profound and complex grasp of the inner mysteries and magic of classical music.
Victor Recondo, once an international touring pianist and former pupil of the great classical pianist Vladimir Horowitz, describes Vikram as a child prodigy whose "incredible" piano skills approach that of the master, Horowitz, himself.
"He is that good," the Madrid-born and Julliard-trained Recondo said of his student. "He is a young man I would consider a genius musically. I would consider his technique almost perfect."
For Vikram, who will appear in concert tonight at Chapel Hill High School, performing is a transformative experience.
"I try to feel what the music is trying to convey, what the composer was thinking when he wrote that great music, romantic music or whatever," he said. "I just try to imagine what the composer would want it to feel like."
In less than a decade, Vikram has advanced from simply enjoying the consonant sounds and chords of compositions to "more the emotions. When I first started, I liked Bach and Mozart and all the very structured stuff. It always made sense," he said.
A straight-A student since the eighth grade who excels in math, Vikram said music carries that same mathematical intrigue for him.
"The ordering of sounds," he said of the appeal to music. "Even the beat's usually divided into sets of two or sets of four. It's just a natural thing that goes beyond equations."
But his musical mastery matured, if reluctantly.
"I was exposed to Chopin and stuff. At first I couldn't stand him because I thought, 'Why is he always slowing down every five seconds?' I didn't like that." As he saw others' play Chopin's sonatas and how they interpreted them in such stirring manner, he got hooked.
On his program tonight is Chopin's Sonata #3. And he will play Islamey by Mili Balakirev -- "Many consider it the hardest piece ever written for the piano," Recondo said. "It's a program that only great composers would perform."
Performing on baby grand pianos is a far cry from Vikram's first instrument.
"We wouldn't really have gotten to know about this talent in my son if it wasn't for the U.S. school system," said his mother, Rukmini Potdar, who was a doctoral student at Cornell at the time who had brought Vikram and his sister here from India. Vikram's elementary school gave free string instrument lessons, and he started on the loaned violin.
"Within a month his violin teacher called me and said, 'You have a very talented violinist, where did he get his training?'" she said.
When Vikram wanted to switch to a piano, they found a newspaper advertisement for an ancient upright, the kind you get for free if you haul it away. That's what they did, and Vikram got free lessons at the local Salvation Army. And he has progressed ever since. He now has a Kawai baby grand at home.
"It's a very interesting story, especially since I don't have any background in western classical music. Nobody in my family does actually," Rukmini Potdar said, though she and her mother did study voice in classical Indian music.
Looking ahead, Vikram said, "I would like to be a concert pianist, but I just think it also would be very nice to have a solid degree in something else . . . I was thinking chemical engineering" with a degree from Cornell.
For tonight, he's more concerned about playing on the Steinway at Chapel Hill High.
"It's always tricky to perform on a completely different piano," he said.
Recondo, though, has complete confidence the concert will be a smash.
"It's scary the way he learns," Recondo said. "You're talking about things like a Tchaikovsky in two months. For a youngster that's going to school and doing other things, that is unheard of."
