Pint-sized prodigy

Meet child violin virtuoso Elli Choi, who began playing with professional orchestras at the age of five

By Adam Zacharias

Published: Sun 18 Apr 2010, 11:10 AM

Last updated: Tue 28 Nov 2023, 8:11 AM

AT JUST EIGHT years old, violinist Elli Choi is the youngest student at the prestigious Julliard School in New York, where she was accepted on a full scholarship.

Born in September 2001, the Korean-American prodigy lives in San Diego, where she attends regular school five days a week. Each Friday, Elli commutes cross-country to spend her weekend studying music at the performing arts academy in the Big Apple.

“My school friends don’t really think it’s weird,” says Elli, who visited the UAE last week after being invited to perform with the Emirates Youth Symphony Orchestra at the Abu Dhabi Festival.

Elli’s fellow students at Julliard also treat her well, although the next youngest is 10 years old. “It’s challenging, and it’s fun,” she says of her musical studies. At present, she is studying the works of her favourite composer – Romantic great Mendelssohn, himself a child wunderkind.

She professes to being more interested in classical music than pop, which Elli finds a little simple for her liking, “but I also like country”, she adds.

Elli, who is sponsored by LG, first began playing the violin aged just three, and took to the instrument like a duck to water. Her musical talent comes from her mother, Youngeun, who is a Berlin-educated concert pianist.

At five, she was performing with the Philadelphia Orchestra and drawing acclaim from world-renowned violinist Itzhak Perlman and cello virtuoso Yo-Yo Ma. Two years later, she became one of the youngest students ever accepted into Julliard in its 105-year history.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Elli says there’s no piece of music which has proven too difficult for her just yet, and she doesn’t get nervous “because I’ve had a lot of concerts” all over the world.

One of these was the 2008 International Suzuki Conference in Torino, Italy, where she was one of just 15 soloists selected from a pool of 20,000 contestants to receive the highest honours.