A scholar’s tribulations: An appeal to Forbes tycoons

Being vastly impressed by the piano recitals of 17-year-old would-be virtuoso Lorenzo B. Medel, I have asked Stephen and Ruth Medel  both doctors of medicine  about their son’s progress in his musical studies and the travails that might thwart his ultimate goals of becoming an international concertist.

What follows is Mrs. Ruth Medel’s letter.

Lorenzo will be pursuing his Bachelor of Music in Piano Performance, a 4-year course at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester in New York this coming September 2013. He will be under the tutelage of Prof. Natalia Antonova, a Russian, who had her debut with the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra at 16 and at 23 was the youngest Professor of Music in the history of the Leningrad Conservatory. She is known as strict and hard-driving, but an excellent and no nonsense teacher. We just wish that the chemistry between Lorenzo and Prof. Antonova will be as good, if not better than that between him and Prof. Mauricia Borromeo, Lorenzo’s current teacher.

It was a harrowing February to March for Lorenzo and we had to go for auditions in many schools from West to East Coast, in deep winter with many snow blizzards causing flight cancellations. Auditioning for the top piano faculty of these schools in a very cold climate was already a big burden, aside from the differences in time zones. There was also much anxiety for Lorenzo, having started late at almost 10, he may be lacking the artistic “maturity” attained by gifted international applicants who started with the piano at 4 to 6 years of age.

But it seemed to have turned out well. Lorenzo was accepted with varying amounts of scholarships in almost all the schools that invited him, namely: 1) The Peabody Institute, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, 2) The New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, 3) The Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio, 4) The Manhattan School of Music and 5) The Mannes, New School of Music both in New York and 6) The San Francisco Conservatory of Music in SF, California. We were quite elated as these schools all belong to the top 5 US schools of Music. A good number of surveys including Newsweek/Kaplan, rank to our surprise Eastman as No. 1 or in the top 3.

Because of the US economic recession, scholarships for the arts have become so much smaller and more scarce than what they were before. As Prof. Reynaldo Reyes told us – many US Music schools have no money. Again luckily, Lorenzo was offered by 5 schools over 50% scholarship for tuition in the next 4 years with 2 schools over 70% of tuition perhaps in recognition of his artistic potential.

The main problem lies however with other expenses like room and board which are mandatory to be school based, health insurance, books and miscellaneous expenses. At Eastman, Lorenzo will receive $32,000 a year of his USD 44,000 tuition, yet still short by $12,000. If we add room and board, insurance, books and miscellaneous expenses we will still have to generate $32-35,000 annually or P1.4 million which could comfortably cover the expenses locally of 3 medical students yearly in a private school like UST or UERM.

For a very middle-class family like ours the expenses become an extreme challenge, perhaps nightmarish will be closer. The sad truth is that we will have to rely solely on our limited resources to help Lorenzo get an excellent piano education.

One of the biggest hurdles nowadays are the Chinese and Korean “hordes” …. They are everywhere and swamping the music schools worldwide. They are talented, disciplined and driven and they seem to have the money to pay full tuition; that is why most top US schools have special auditions for them each year in Shanghai, Beijing and Seoul. Majority of the international students are Chinese or Korean and even American students who have Chinese sounding names indicating their Chinese ancestry. Whereas before only a few hundred applied in each school, now there are thousands applying, but only one in two hundred is accepted and fewer still are given scholarships. We still consider ourselves lucky.

Lorenzo will be entered by Prof. Antonova in his first school-wide piano competition in October, only a month from start of classes. It will be a Mendelssohn Piano Competition, and he will be playing Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in G minor. The pieces that Prof. Antonova has assigned him before he gets into Eastman this September will surely cause panic among the fainthearted, but he seems to be facing the challenge well. The Chopin Etudes and Ballade No. 4, Rachmaninoff Etudes and the Corelli Variations and Haydn’s A-flat sonata are also assigned. The journey continues!

Artists don’t receive government subsidy. Forbes lists tycoons who could – or should – respond immediately to Lorenzo’s urgent needs.

I trust they will not think twice about issuing checks to Lorenzo B. Medel and sending these through to the De La Salle brothers in Greenhills.