Elissa Miller-Kay, a pianist who won first prize in the prestigious International Beethoven Piano Sonata Competition, is the guest soloist in an upcoming performance of the York Symphony, an orchestra that includes her mother on violin.
Miller-Kay’s mother, Rickey Miller, who studied piano seriously up to the end of high school, learned to play violin as an adult. She took lessons with her then-six-year-old son, Jeremy, who’s now 28.
“She learned violin alongside him,” Miller-Kay said. “It’s amazing to learn an instrument as an adult.” She said her mother always encouraged her to take music seriously, as did the other family members, including her music-loving grandmother, Faye Miller, who at 97, still goes to the opera and symphony.
“It’s a tough career,” Miller-Kay said.
Miller-Kay, a Thornhill, Ont., native, won the Ben Steinberg Musical Legacy Award in 2006, an award created by Temple Sinai in Toronto to support the careers of young Jewish artists in Canada. She said that when she competed in the 13th Biennial International Beethoven Piano Sonata Competition in Memphis, Tenn., in 2009, she tried not to think of it as a competition in order to deal with the stress.
“I focused on communicating the music to the audience and the judges.”
When it was announced that she had won, she said, “I was kind of overwhelmed and a little surprised.” She added that the win was a good boost for her career.
Miller-Kay currently lives in New York, where she’s doing her PhD in piano studies at New York University and teaching. She performs regularly in cities on both sides of the border and has played Carnegie Hall. She said she likes performing in Canadian cities, where there are not as many concerts as in New York “so audiences can be more enthusiastic.”
She said she chose NYU so that she could study with the university’s internationally acclaimed piano faculty member, Martin Canin. Also, she enjoys research and writing about music, and the university offers a program that allows her to write a dissertation. Miller-Kay is writing about the way Beethoven’s piano sonatas were performed in the 19th century.
Unlike today, classical musicians improvised. They were “a lot more free,” she said. She said she feels connected to many composers, but Beethoven is the one she’s “drawn to the most.” There’s deep suffering in his music, she said, and “there’s a feeling of triumph.
“That’s true of many of his works. Beethoven was very bold and doing something new. He almost invented Romanticism in music. He really shocked people at the time.”
Miller-Kay plays Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, Op. 110, in a documentary the actor Ethan Hawke made about the piano teacher, Seymour Bernstein.
In Seymour: An Introduction, which is currently in post-production, Bernstein gives a master class to three students, and she is one of them.
Miller-Kay has an unusual background for a musician. She studied biochemistry at the University of Toronto. While she was there, she was also attending the Royal Conservatory of Music.
“It became clear that after two years I had to make a choice,” she said. “It came down to my love of performing. There’s nothing like performing for an audience.”
Miller-Kay, 32, pictured, and her mother, Rickey Miller, perform with the York Symphony Orchestra on May 24 at 8 p.m. at Trinity Anglican Church in Aurora, Ont., and on May 25 at 7:30 p.m. at the Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts. Miller-Kay will play Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, and the orchestra will perform Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. For more information about Miller-Kay, visit www.elissamillerkay.com.