‘Yes,’ she replies, as we watch Alma bounding across the lawn swooshing her rope in the air, ‘but she is also just a child playing.Before his work on radioactivity won him the Nobel Prize and helped usher in the nuclear age, Enrico Fermi was considered a mathematics and physics prodigy. Now I understand, I say to Janie, she is not just a child playing. ‘Of course I have to work hard,’ she says, ‘but all children have to work hard for exams, and at least when I work hard, I work hard for something incredibly exciting, like seeing my whole opera put on stage.’ When I leave, Alma is in the garden skipping with her tasselled rope. These performances will be followed by the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France and the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland. ‘He wants to help,’ says Guy).Īlma has a packed diary, preparing for her first concert in China in October a performance of Cinderella in San Jose, California, with an orchestra of 44 musicians in December, and a shortened version of Cinderella for children in Vienna in January. They now have a team of advisers: PR manager, financier, agent (Alma is the youngest ever British composer to be signed by an agent: Martin Campbell-White, who worked with Simon Rattle from the age 18 and is now semi-retired, is working gratis. ‘I am not sure she is desperately keen to be playing the piano or violin on stage in front of a large audience,’ says Guy. Does she ever feel left out? Guy and Janie respond by saying that of course both girls are special, very special, and point out that Helen is a different character. She is also taught via Skype from Switzerland by a specialist in a method, used in Italy in the 18th and 19th centuries, that teaches children composition in a playful way.īut what about Helen? I say. ‘Even with her friends, Alma plays very intensely, and after that she will say, “Now I have to be on my own for a bit and dream.” It would be difficult to do that in school.’Īlma was behind the move to Surrey, owing to her having lessons with two teachers from the nearby Yehudi Menuhin School. ‘Her needs are different and it’s quite difficult for any school, even with the best intentions, to cater for someone like that,’ says Guy. But her parents believe Alma wouldn’t have thrived in mainstream education anyway. She seems thrilled to be teaching her daughters ‘about fossils or Portuguese explorers, Tudors and Stuarts, or whatever it is’. Janie, who has given up her university job, is also a huge support, home-schooling both girls. These days she does most of the inputting herself, and Guy helps ‘with the more tricky features’. ‘Alma was never particularly technologically minded,’ he says. When Alma was younger, Guy, who now works from home writing books on linguistics, would input Alma’s written compositions on to the computer. ‘She outstripped us, maybe even at seven.’ Alma’s parents bought her first violin when she was three, paid for a teacher, nurtured her gifts, taught her what they know. A musical prodigy, in particular, hinges on parental involvement. ‘It wasn’t really anything unusual for me.’īut of course a child prodigy – as David Henry Feldman and Lynn T Goldsmith, both experts in the field, have pointed out – ‘is a group enterprise’. ‘I always had little melodies in my head,’ she explains. We should pay attention to that.’ She has the ability to name any note she hears with the effortlessness that most people can name a colour.Īlma composed her first piece before she was four. ‘I remember thinking, that’s a bit unusual. She sang something like “shashi shashi shashi sha” – but the notes were pitch perfect,’ says Guy.
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