Blind pianist Tony Lu charts path to success

Blind since infancy, pianist Tony Lu has overcome a lot of obstacles to achieve what he has now.

Born and raised in Wuhan, China, he was at first home-schooled by his parents, who didn’t like the country’s underdeveloped education program for the disabled, but he ran through the curriculum so quickly that he was “running out of subjects to study” by what would have been his middle-school years.

His music studies got off to an equally rocky start. At age 5, his parents took him to a music store to try out some instruments. “Piano was one of the few instruments where I could make some sounds,” said Lu, who will give a free concert Friday at the Orvis Auditorium at University of Hawaii at Manoa. “On the violin you couldn’t really make sound, and the wind instruments are hard.”

None of the local piano teachers knew how to teach a blind student, so the few who tried merely emphasized memorization rather than musicality. They would play a piece slowly for him during a lesson, then tell him to spend the week memorizing it.

“In my mind, I thought this was not hard at all,” Lu said. “I could memorize the notes, but also part of it was like, ‘I don’t think this is how people learn the piano at all.’”

At age 10, he finally connected with a teacher who made recordings of the pieces, so that during the lessons they could actually work on issues such as interpretation and style. “Within a year, I was playing the easier Mozart sonatas,” he said.

Meanwhile, his school studies had reached a standstill, so he looked overseas. Eventually, he was accepted into a high school in St. Louis, where he lived with host families while attending school. Though he had only studied rudimentary English in China, according to Lu, his teacher said, “I think he works hard enough that we throw Shakespeare at him right away. And that’s what he did.” Now, at age 25, Lu speaks English with a bare trace of an accent.

Just nine years after his arrival from China, Lu has bachelor’s degrees in math, history and music from Bennington College in Vermont, as well as a master’s in music from Austin Peay State University in Tennessee. He teaches both performance and music history at the Sonatina piano camps, a respected program for adults and children in Vermont, and gives solo and chamber music concerts in the Northeast.

He’s spent much of his musical career confronting challenges. When one of his teachers in China focused exclusively on Bach, Mozart and early Beethoven, telling him he was “emotionally not ready” to play later composers like Chopin or Schumann, he decided to read about the life and times of those composers. When he began competing in piano competitions in Missouri, a judge suggested he try playing chamber music.

“I said, ‘I listen to a lot of chamber music. I’ve never tried chamber music,’” he said. “She said, ‘I can record the part for you, the piano part, and you just memorize it and learn along with everyone else. So that opened up another door, and I played a lot of chamber music in high school.”

His performance on Sunday will feature his own transcriptions (instrumental pieces converted to a new work for a specific instrument, such as piano) and improvisation inspired by composers ranging from Beethoven to American composer George Rochberg. Rochberg had composed in a modern experimental style for much of his life, then abandoned it in favor of tonal styles associated with composers like Beethoven and Mahler.

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Tony Lu in Concert

>> When: 7:30 p.m. March 24

>> Where: Orvis Auditorium, UH-Manoa

>> Cost: Free

>> Info: 808-956-8742