"I thought, 'She does need a little tweaking here and there,' " says Gardner. But, he admitted, he did not immediately mark Chloe as prodigy material. Any teacher would be crazy not to want to have a crack at it," Gardner says. "Of course I was impressed and wanted to teach her. Elena Pang asked James Arthur Gardner, a Walnut Creek pianist known for producing accomplished young musicians, to hear Chloe play a Hayden concerto. By the time Chloe was 8, the mother-daughter relationship was making the teacher-student relationship difficult. Chloe's father, she says, "plays the stereo."Ĭhloe began studying piano under her mother's instruction at 4 years old. Her mother plays piano and her 8-year-old brother, Clark, plays cello. Her grandmother is an accomplished abstract artist. Since birth, Chloe has been immersed in art. "The doctor told me, 'Sweetie, they're just hiccups.' But she had impeccable rhythm," Elena Pang says. Whenever Elena Pang, a piano teacher, would play Joseph Haydn's work, Chloe would start to kick. The petite pianist has been a performer since the womb, her mother says. "It's relaxing, fun, exciting," she says, her silver braces constantly exposed by her smile. In her free time, she likes beading with hemp.īut Chloe, who dreams of traveling the world as a concert pianist, admits that nothing quite compares to performing for an audience. She likes skiing and Alfred Hitchcock movies. Her CD player is more likely to be playing the latest hit by the rap duo Outkast or soulful singer Norah Jones than anything by Mozart or Beethoven. "It connotes negative things - someone who's not normal, someone who has no childhood," she said.Ĭhloe practices for four hours each day but insists the other 20 are spent doing normal stuff. "Nervous," Chloe says, "is not a word in the Pang vocabulary." Though the performing venues have grown progressively larger - culminating in her performance on Letterman for a television audience of millions - over the years, Chloe's nerves have not once been shaken. Whether she's playing a more contemporary Debussy piece or classical Beethoven, Chloe's fingers dance across her black 9-foot Steinway piano with miraculous grace and virtuosic form. She also loves Pilates, Audrey Hepburn and John Steinbeck - not to mention Bach and Mozart. "He was joking, but she really loves yoga." She really got him," explains Chloe's mother, Elena Pang. Chloe, a yoga practitioner, didn't catch Letterman's wit - she's usually in bed when his show airs. Letterman had made a sarcastic comment about the popular exercise in an earlier show. The show aired March 5, but just a week after her five minutes of witty repartee with Letterman, the unassuming preteen struggles to remember exactly what happened that night. She faced-off against more than 100 other young pianists from around the world in a yearlong application process, culminating in a performance at New York City's Columbia Artists Management Hall six weeks ago. The late-night talk show host invited Chloe to perform after she won top prize in the prestigious Pinault International Competition. I'm just a normal kid."Ī week ago, this normal kid from Orinda smiled and waved for New York paparazzi as she left "The Late Show With David Letterman." Despite the slew of national and international awards under her tiny belt, Chloe says, "I don't like to be raised up. The Orinda seventh-grader's humility is almost as impressive as her talent. But ask Chloe what makes her special, and she replies, "I'm not really sure."
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