Lydian Nadhaswaram won a whopping $1 million this year on an American reality show, for his proficiency at the keys, and has been on The Ellen DeGeneres Show too. Catch his first orchestra performance on September 27 in Mumbai
Lydian Nadhaswaram digs fancy cars. Once in a while, the 13-year-old surfs the internet looking for YouTube videos on cars. Not speed monsters, but classy, luxury ones. “I love a Rolls-Royce,” he says with a disarming smile. Little coincidence perhaps that the object he showers most of his affection on at home is a Steinway, the Rolls-Royce equivalent among pianos.
The Steinway grand piano reached Lydian in 2017 from halfway across the globe. Billionaire American investor Michael Novogratz had it shipped to his Chennai house after he heard him play at a music salon in the US. Then 11, and after barely two years of playing the piano, Lydian had impressed the New York socialite circle with a mastery over complicated Western classical pieces—from Beethoven to Mozart, Chopin and everything in between—that were beyond his pithy frame and years.
Lydian’s teen growth spurt has now pushed him inches over his father’s shoulder, and his mop top’s a tad more outgrown and dishevelled. But he still prefers to clutch on to his father while crossing the road. Once he’s in front of the piano, though, he needs no handholding. At Mumbai’s National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA), where Lydian and his father, Tamil music director Varshan Sathish, arrived recently in matching canary yellow kurtas for a photo shoot with Forbes India, there was no tearing him away from the piano: His left fingers kept tapping away when he would turn right for the camera and vice versa. Each time the squeak of the camera flash rose above the music, he echoed it on the instrument, perfect to the note and the pitch. It takes a village to put together a concert, but all Lydian needs is a piano.
​On September 27, Lydian will perform at the NCPA along with the Symphony Orchestra of India at its season finale, where he’ll join the SOI to play Franz Haydn’s piano Concerto Number 11 in D major. “This will be my first performance with an orchestra and a professional conductor. I need to practise well to be in sync with them,” he says.
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Lydian’s proficiency on the piano received international acclaim earlier this year when he won the first season of The World’s Best, a reality show on American TV channel CBS that was judged by actor Drew Barrymore, singer and producer Faith Hill, and TV personality RuPaul. He played Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ at double the average speed (325 bpm), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s ‘Turkish March’ blindfolded, and the tempestuous third movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ that he later paired with drums, and won a whopping $1 million in prize money. What does he plan to do with all that money? Buy Complan, his favourite drink, jokes Sathish.