Natasha Paremski

Natasha Paremski

Natasha Paremski first realized she was mature for her age when she was eight years old. Her parents moved to LA from Russia after winning a Green Card Lottery, and she immediately felt different from the children around her: 'The material we studied in school in Russia was much more advanced than what they were doing in California so I was put in a class two grades ahead.'

Not many pianists make their professional debut at the age of nine. And not many make their recording debut at 15, or perform as soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic when they are still in their teens. Now approaching her 20s, you might almost think it's about time for Paremski to start considering her retirement.

But she's only just getting started. Still studying under Pavlina Dokovska at the Mannes College of Music in New York, she's got a packed concert schedule ahead of her this summer, including a tour to Spain and performances at California's Green Music Festival and the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival in New Mexico. She's also busy preparing John Corigliano's Piano Concerto for performances in the 2007/08 season - and that's between various multimedia projects and TV appearances.

'We had a very cute old piano in our apartment in Moscow and one day I just started playing it'

So just how has the Russian pianist achieved such success in such a short space of time? 'I guess I've always wanted to live up to the people around me,' she says. 'I've always been surrounded by people who are much older than me so I always grew up rather quickly. And I've never allowed people to cut me any slack. Why get used to that? That's not going to happen for most of your life. So I've never allowed that.'

Despite her child prodigy status, Paremski was not pushed into music from an early age by her parents. She doesn't even come from a particularly musical family - her mother and father are both keen amateur pianists but make a living in computer science, and her younger brother has just gained a place to study aerospace engineering at Santa Fe State University in California.

'We had a very cute old piano in our apartment in Moscow and one day I just started playing it,' she says. 'I would just sit and play around with it every day. And I think it was that that actually inspired my mother to enrol me at music school.'

She began her musical career at the Andreyev School of Music in Moscow, later enrolling at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music after her family moved to the States. At 15 she won a competition to play as soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and it wasn't long before other US orchestras came knocking at her door: the San Francisco Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, Colorado Symphony, Houston Symphony, New York Youth Symphony and San Diego Symphony, to name a few.

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