A growing number of people, especially children, with visual impairments are learning piano. But they face challenges that teachers and parents are working to overcome.
Liu Hao's fingers danced across the keyboard in a way that an audience would never guess he has a visual impairment.
His body swung with the melody as a flurry of fingers stormed across the ivories, creating a blizzard of notes.
The 17-year-old was immersed in the serene world of Ricordanza (Andantino) created by Franz Liszt nearly 200 years ago.
It took him two days to learn the transcendental etude.
Every day, he played from 8 am until noon, from 2 pm to 6 pm and from 6:30 pm to 10 pm.
Liszt and Franz Schubert are his favorite composers, and, over the next 50 minutes, he performed pieces by them alongside others he'd just learned by Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven and Fryderyk Chopin.
Liu's teacher, renowned pianist Sheng Yuan, sat at the corner, listening.
"What do you think of your performance?" Sheng asked, when he'd finished.
Liu paused. "Not very precise."
"Expressiveness?" Sheng asked. Another pause. "Not bad."
"Are there differences from your previous performances onstage?"
Silence.
Sheng broke the quiet after a moment. He pointed out Liu was tense because he wasn't familiar enough with the new pieces.
He asked Liu to calm down and keep practicing over the next four days－that is, until his graduation exam at the Piano Academy in Gulangyu under the Central Conservatory of Music.
Sheng spent the rest of the class coaching Liu's intensity, rhythm and expression.
He asked Liu to stand up, strike the pose he felt most comfortable with and imagine his best moves with his back tall and straight.
Liu's uncertainty was immediately replaced by the full play of his skills and expressiveness.
Liu melted into relief the moment Sheng left the room after class. "My hands were so cold," he said.
His mother, Kang Guiqin, burst out laughing. "I know!"
A concert dilemma
Sheng came into Liu's life three years ago, and the teacher has found the focus on Liu's visual impairment to be a challenge.
Sheng organized a charity piano concert with mostly visually-impaired performers, including Liu, in Beijing in October.
Dai Bo, a visually-impaired composer and pianist, who's also a lecturer with the composition department of the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, also performed at the event.
"I didn't want to emphasize their physical situation in the concert's publicity," Sheng says.
But, he discovered he had little choice if he wanted to sell tickets and raise public awareness, and besides, if people didn't know in advance, they'd find out when the performers took the stage.
Moreover, the media has reported Liu's inspiring story since he was young.
Celebrated pianist Lang Lang performed Schubert's Marches Militaires with him when he was 6 and has kept tabs on his progress since, while his story was also adapted into a 2010 film.
Sheng confesses he's still confused by the dilemma.
