Interview: Kit Armstrong, concert pianist, composer and mathematician

The nearest Kit Armstrong has ever come to visiting Scotland was the time he boarded the wrong train from Carlisle.

“I was heading for Whitehaven, but ended up going in the wrong direction,” recalls the 20-year-old American-born concert pianist, whose forthcoming visit to the Perth Festival of the Arts with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra next week is entirely intentional.

It’s part of a major tour with the former Eastern bloc Berlin band and Munich-based guest conductor Alexander Liebreich, which will include 16 dates in the UK and a performance by Armstrong of Schumann’s Piano Concerto.

Perth is their only appearance north of the Border, thus the sole opportunity for Scottish audiences to see what all the fuss is about regarding Armstrong, who first came to mass public notice as a ten-year-old prodigy appearing on America’s Late Show with David Letterman.

If the Letterman appearance (you can view it on YouTube) has all the trappings of circus-style TV, it nonetheless marked the public launchpad for Armstrong who, by 12, had already captured the attention of the New York Times. Its critic recognised him as “a phenomenon”, though issued a warning that, by calling him “the new Mozart”, his publicity people might be guilty of ill-advised hype, even if his performances revealed a maturity beyond his years.

The thing is, Armstrong was already intellectually ahead of the game. He was by then studying at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute, and attending science and maths courses at the University of Pennsylvania.

He had started learning the piano aged five, but had written his own compositions well before that, one of which – an immaculately-structured, if cutely traditional, piece of piano writing – he had performed for Letterman and his millions of viewers.

By his next birthday, when most 13-year-old boys would have been struggling with the emotional transition to secondary school, Armstrong was in London, studying composition at the Royal Academy of Music, piano with Benjamin Kaplan and taking advanced maths classes at Imperial College, while accepting major performance engagements in the US and Europe.

He had already been spotted by Alfred Brendel, whom Armstrong met after a performance the youngster gave in Philadelphia. Brendel agreed to mentor him, an extraordinary endorsement of Armstrong’s integrity as a musician, given that Brendel only teaches the chosen few, and even then, only those who share his intense universal intellectualism.

“We came together purely through music,” Armstrong recalls. “My playing of a Chopin Nocturne caught his interest. But over the past eight years that has become something way beyond music. We share so many interests in art, aesthetics and in humour. We tend to overuse the word ‘inspiration’, but I can’t come up with a better way to describe the influence he has had on showing me how lucky I am to be in this profession.”

According to his mother – an English-born investment banker and economist who brought him up alone – Armstrong was reading the Wall Street Journal by the age of three, and was withdrawn from mainstream education because it was too easy for him and not sufficiently stimulating. But despite his intense upbringing, there are aspects of Armstrong’s unconventional life that are conventional.

When I call him in Berlin, the strange background noises turn out to be the result of his ability to conduct a phone interview and make chicken soup at the same time. “I’m just making sure no culinary disaster happens under my watch,” he says. “I’m a very ambitious cook.”

Yet when I ask Armstrong, now 20, where home is, he is hard put to answer. “I’m in Berlin just now, and that happens to be where my piano lives, but I am travelling around, living mainly in hotels. If I had a home, I think it would be in London.”

Nonetheless, he resists being pigeonholed. Ask him about his ambitions and plans as a pianist, and the answer is surprisingly vague. “I don’t give such matters much thought,” he says. “I see myself more as an absorbed creator than a self-promoter. I take what comes.”

What comes is an extraordinary 60 to 70 concerts a year, added to which Armstrong is simultaneously active as a composer, not to mention his continuing preoccupation with mathematical studies.

“I’ve always been interested in many things,” he says. “I’ve never tried to specialise. But the concerts keep me excited. I need them to renew my great love of music.”

The Schumann concerto, which he plays in Perth, has a special place in his repertoire. “There really was no model for it, but it inspired so many concertos that followed, even – in the case of Grieg’s concerto, which shares the same structure – to the point of plagiarism.”

If originality counts, then surely it’s Armstrong’s resistance to the celebrity circus that could so easily have resulted from his boyhood Letterman appearance. And now that he’s deliberately heading for Scotland, we can check him out for ourselves.

• Kit Armstrong and the Berlin Symphony Orchestra play Perth Concert Hall on 20 May as part of the Perth Festival of the Arts.