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I first met Lilika Petrovich at an EPTA summer course in Subotica, Serbia in 1994. When I heard her students play with such astonishing maturity and differentiated sound, I told myself, “If you ever have a kid, this lady is going to teach her piano.” A decade later this dream has come true, as my 7-year old Masha started lessons with Lilika in the autumn of 2005.

Lilika is a treasure. Her way of working with young children is magical. She engages the child in play and fantasy, but then uses this engagement to super-saturate the child with new information about music and piano. Her focus is constantly shifting, from learning to sing the tonic sol-fa, to tapping a regular beat with one hand while the other plays a rhythm, to lifting the arms and letting each segment of the arm drop in turn, to learning the geography of black and white keys on the piano, to singing an actual song, to writing some notes on the grand staff, and finally to playing an actual song. She says, “A child gets tired quickly and needs a change of focus. But they recover their strength very quickly as well, so it is possible to work in a very concentrated way with them.”

She never worries about motivating the child. She engages the child in such a way that in a moment the child is wide-eyed with wonder – and then she has the child fulfill a musical task that relates to that wonder. No motivation needed!

She combines play and intense work. She quickly instills a sense of perfection in the child, asking in her quiet way, “Was that really perfect, the best you can do?” and when the child agrees that it wasn’t, taking her in hand to make it even better. In terms of musicianship, she treats the child like a little adult, demanding things from a 6-year old that I can honestly say none of my teachers, even those I had later, ever required of me. She demands that the child’s fingers express the song in her heart, playing a melody espressivo and not just tapping out notes.

And sometimes she will consciously have the child repeat a phrase or piece many times, when the child is already tired, demanding ever more perfection from the child, until the parent if present is ready to rescue the child from this torture, when all of a sudden the child plays the piece more beautifully than ever. She calls this awakening a state of prolonged concentration in the child.

Lilika studied in Paris: piano with Yvonne Lefevure, pedagogy with Alfred Cortot, methodics with Nadia Boulanger. She studied in Moscow with Timakin. She represents a rich and varied pedagogical tradition that, instead of watering down the pedagogical regime to suit today’s modern tastes, enriches the child’s musical experience and awakens the inner musician latent in every child. With Lilika teaching my Masha I feel like the luckiest Dad in the world, and this page chronicles some of the ways I've seen her work. As Lilika's pedagogical background resembles my own (Cortot is my pianistic great-grandfather), a lot of what she does is a more original version of my own work.

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