14-Year Old Violinist Tours Globe

Fourteen-year-old Stephen Waarts of Los Altos has already achieved more in his young musical career than some professional musicians do in their entire lives.

A talented violinist, Stephen has performed in several states and countries like Russia, Norway and Germany, and he just wrapped up a series of concerts in Menlo Park and Palo Alto over the weekend, as a featured performer with the Silicon Valley Symphony. The concerts were specially designed for him and were called, “Prodigy Plays Mendelssohn.”

“I enjoy playing with the Silicon Valley Symphony, they’re very good,” Stephen said over the weekend, in between his performances at the in Menlo Park on Friday and St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palo Alto on Saturday.

Michael Gibson, music director and conductor for the Silicon Valley Symphony, said, the pleasure is all theirs.

“Stephen Waarts is a true prodigy and musical genius,” he said. “He is brilliant, and getting better all the time.”

A Prodigy’s Beginnings

Stephen remembers his decision to take up violin at the age of 5—it was spurred by his twin brother.

“My brother and I went to see a concert at my old school. My brother said he wanted to start playing violin, so I decided to start too,” he recalled.

Though his brother eventually stopped playing the instrument, Stephen had fallen in love.

“I like that, with violin, you can make many different colors with your music, and it’s kind of challenging, also,” Stephen said. “I guess that my favorite composer would have to be Mozart.”

Stephen began studying regularly under the expert tutelage of Li Lin at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and, when he was available, the concertmaster of the San Francisco Symphony. He showed true promise, and began performing in front of audiences after only six months of lessons.

The performances kept growing in size, and prestige. To date, Stephen has performed with 17 different orchestras around the world, and the calls keep coming in, from orchestras that want to feature him as a special soloist. His next performance will be at St. Paul’s Towers in Oakland, which will be a recital with Miles Graber on piano; and in August, the Los Angeles Jewish Symphony has invited him down to play a concert at the Ford Amphitheater, where he will play a rare violin concerto by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco.

Around the world, he was recently selected out of many applicants to play featured performances at the Menuhin competition in Norway and the Spohr competition in Germany.

Stephen’s parents, Orli and Robert Waarts, who were born in Holland, say it can sometimes be a challenge to keep up with Stephen’s cross-country and worldly travels. Usually, said Orli, one parent will accompany Stephen while the other stays home with his twin brother.

In order to accommodate Stephen’s rigorous schedule of three to four hours of practice a day plus two to three lessons a week with his instructors, Stephen attends the in Los Altos, where he schedules one-on-one tutoring and teaching sessions. Stephen says, he still has homework and takes tests like any typical student.

What the Future Holds

Stephen says, he can easily see himself either continuing with his music and making a life-long career out of performing, or making a career out of math, perhaps as a researcher, as math is his favorite subject and he enjoys the advanced math courses he is currently taking.

Orli says, though her son’s career is only nine years old, he has already achieved what most violinists achieve in a lifetime, so she worries that he will “max out” his opportunities before long, with nothing new out there to try.

“I think a lifelong career will depend on whether or not he wants to continue,” she said on Saturday. “He’s already so good, and he already plays such a broad repertoire, I sometimes worry if he will get tired of playing the same repertoire over and over,” she said, explaining that there is a finite number of violin compositions out there in the world—and, at 14, he has already played a significant percentage of them.

“He played the Tchaikovsky Concerto when he was only 12 years old, an accomplishment not duplicated by any person that age that I could find,” Gibson said. “At 13 he played Brahms and now, at 14, he is playing Mendelssohn. He is a true prodigy, and a musical genius.”

Gibson said, it never fails to amaze him that Stephen plays everything from memory, rarely needing to look at sheet music.

“He has played from memory not only the performances, but all the rehearsals as well.”

In addition to his two upcoming concerts in Oakland and Los Angeles, Stephen already has a packed summer schedule to look forward to. He will soon return to the Perlman Music Program in New York for the second summer in a row, where he will study for a full six weeks with renowned violinist, Ipzhak Perlman.

“Perlman is probably the most famous living violinist in the world right now,” said Orli.

Following that, Stephen has already been accepted into the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia for the next school year—an honor only a handful of musicians from around the world can boast to. He will be studying under Aaron Ranzand.

“It’s a very famous music school; the most prestigious in the world. Most of the students that go there go on to be very famous musicians,” Orli continued. “It’s quite selective, and they only accept a handful of violinists every year. Many of them have won world competitions. ”

Orli said, it will be a difficult school year, as Stephen is too young to attend the school as a boarder without a parent accompanying him. So, she and her husband will trade off living at the school with Stephen and living at home with his brother in Los Altos. Only during vacations will they get to be together as a whole family.

“Most of the other students at the school are older than Stephen, so they can stay at the school by themselves,” Orli explained.

But, the Waarts family is used to Stephen being in such small company when it comes to his age and talent and, for such an amazing opportunity, it will all be worth it in the end.

“Right now he’s definitely on the path to becoming very famous and successful,” Orli said. “It’s all up to him, if he wants to continue.”

To learn more about Stephen Waarts, visit www.stephenwaarts.com.