Shawn Vestal: For elite young pianist, it's not all about the notes

Jun. 10—In the photograph, 11-month-old Jeslyn Cai sits at a piano, hands on the keys, eyes lifted toward the music.

She was not yet playing the piano or reading music, of course. But seeing it now — through the perfect vision of hindsight — it looks like an unmistakable omen.

Cai's mother began teaching her daughter the piano before she was 4. By elementary school, Cai had begun studying with a teacher and playing in — and winning — local piano competitions; by middle school, she'd begun competing in state and regional competitions, and claimed a top prize in an international event with her older brother, Justin.

In high school, the honors kept coming.

At this point — as Cai graduates from Lewis and Clark High School and prepares to move on to Duke University in the fall — the 18-year-old Spokane native has won more than 40 regional, national and international piano competitions. She has performed all over the world, including on the grand stages of Berlin, Vienna, London and Rome.

She's played Carnegie Hall twice — once as a pianist and once as a violinist with an orchestra.

It's a long, long way from "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star."

"Piano has been kind of a long journey for me, because I started when I was so young," Cai said last week in an interview at her family's home south of Spokane.

Hers is an elite resume — and yet the piano, while the main channel of Cai's many talents and interests, makes up only part of it. She's an accomplished violinist, who has played with various orchestras. She formed a nonprofit during the pandemic to provide masks to frontline health care workers and help Spokane's homeless people, and has volunteered in many other ways. She's president of her school's National Honor Society and Key Club, and sits on the city's Chase Youth Commission.

You'd lose track trying to account for all of the awards she's won, but they include honors for essay writing and entrepreneurship, poetry and debate. She's studied college-level Latin. She won the Spokane Public Schools Exceptional Excellence Award last year for an intense, monthslong effort to help use regression modeling to develop an algorithm to help the Spokane Symphony better forecast its ticket sales and revenues.

"When she was putting her résumé together," said her mother, Weiling Zhu, "it just became longer and longer and longer."

Cai will graduate Sunday with highest honors from LC — one of the thousands of young people, in this season of ending and beginnings, of celebrating past chapters and starting new ones, who are carrying their talents and accomplishments and potential into the future. It is no exaggeration to say that she does so as one of the elite pianists of her age in the world.

"She's won everything there is to win," said her longtime piano teacher, Karlyn Frost Brett.

'Not just about the

notes'

Watching Cai at the piano is like watching a musical athlete. She bends and flows with the music, attacks and coaxes, flies about, then stays nearly still. She all but pounds the keyboard during stormy passages — lifting from the bench with the effort — then flutters delicately through the quieter ones.

On a recent afternoon at her family's home , Cai played one of her favorite pieces, Rachmaninoff's Sonata No. 2 in B flat minor. Sitting at the Steinway grand piano in the family's living room, where she has spent hour upon hour practicing, Cai seemed transported once she began. The sonata is considered one of the most difficult piano pieces of all time, and Cai played it flawlessly.

"I want to get all of the story out and all of the emotions," she said. "That's the part of music that I really love."

Brett said Cai's physicality is a pronounced, distinctive element of her style.

"She feels the music," Brett said. "She just dances with it."

Cai loves the romantic period of classical music — Rachmaninoff, DeBussy, Ravel — because those composers "know how to melt someone's heart." For her, playing well isn't only about technical brilliance. It's about trying to convey the emotional journey of the song.

"There's a story behind the piece," she said. "It's not just about the notes."

Arriving at this understanding was a key to her development as a pianist, she said. It was the turning point from her earliest years, when learning the piano was something that arose more from her parents' encouragement and following in the footsteps of her brother to developing her personal vision of why she wanted to play the piano — to tell those musical stories at the keyboard.

In an essay for her college applications, she wrote about her early connection to the symphonic poem "Die Moldeau," by the Czech composer Bedrich Smetana — a musical tribute to Smetana's country and its longest river. She played this piece as a duet with her brother when she was a middle-schooler; they won the prestigious Music Teachers National Association competition with the piece, which earned them a spot on stage at an international competition at the Berlin Philharmonic.

She and her family visited Prague beforehand, where Cai was able to see the river and the city that gave the Smetana piece its story.

"I burst into tears on the bank of the Moldau River with the moon shining over the medieval stone arch bridge," she wrote.

She went on to play with her brother in Berlin, where she won the Rising Star Grand Prix International Champion prize.

Then she came home to Spokane and prepared for her freshman year of high school.

'It felt like a dream'

Cai's parents were born and raised in China, and came to America in 1992 with a pair of suitcases between them to earn their MBAs at Gonzaga University. They took to Spokane immediately — wrapped in the generosity of the people who welcomed them and helped them — and never left.

"People here were so incredibly kind," Zhu said.

When they graduated, they began receiving job offers immediately. Eventually, they decided to stay and go through the naturalization process. They've lived here ever since.

Zhu is now chief financial officer at the Spokane Symphony and is president of the Spokane Chinese Society. Cai's father, Vinson Cai, is a professor of finance at Eastern Washington University.

Zhu said that she played piano as a child, and it was something her own mother encouraged when she was growing up in the Canton province. Her family bought a piano at a time when they were a rare and costly luxury in personal homes.

But as she followed the rigorous academic path to prepare for college, her practice time was limited.

"It's almost like a dream that I myself could not go through, but now my kids can," she said.

As someone with a belief in lifelong education — an education that begins at age zero, as she put it — she placed her kids on the path to learning the piano from a young age.

Jeslyn Cai studied with Brett from a very young age through today; she has also worked with the pianist and teacher Peter Mack, a member of the faculty at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle.

In the years following the Berlin prize, her profile grew and grew. When the pandemic arrived, it had the side effect of giving Jeslyn Cai much more time at home — she worked on the piano for hours a day. The world of piano competitions shifted toward more video presentations, at least in the qualifying stages.

She's won top honors repeatedly at prestigious international festivals — winning first place in her age group and often claiming the top overall awards, at competitions in England, Italy, France, Germany, Canada and cities around the U.S.

In 2021, she won the chance to play at Carnegie Hall in New York City and Rome's Parco Della Musica in two separate competitions; she performed at the venues five days apart over Christmas break at the end of that year.

Performing in the storied Carnegie Hall was "so crazy," she said — a beautiful hall with amazing acoustics and so much cultural history. There — as with all of her performances and competitions — she relished meeting other young people whose dedication to the piano matches her own.

"It felt like a dream," she said.

'More to explore'

The pandemic was also the spur for a nonmusical project of Cai's. In the early stages of the viral spread, when masks were in short supply, she crowd-funded a project to distribute 5,000 masks to 11 local hospitals and health care facilities.

That effort became Team Gleam, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that has since attracted more than $10,000 in funding and built a volunteer team of nearly 100 young people. Team Gleam partners with other local charities to provide meals to the homeless and seniors in Spokane, and offers grants for underprivileged students.

For all of her accomplishments, Jeslyn Cai does not consider herself particularly talented. She views what she's done as a musician as a product of continuous effort.

"For me, it was definitely hard work," she said. "You do have to spend those hours to get really good at a piece."

The time at the piano — plus everything else in her busy schedule — might make you wonder when Jeslyn Cai had time to relax or have fun.

She said it was a lot of work to do what she's done, and that there were times she couldn't hang out with her friends or do some of the things other kids were doing. She claims to have hobbies — snowboarding, baking, longboarding, hiking — but it's hard to imagine when in the world she would ever pursue them.

"I did have to sacrifice, but at the end of the day it was very worthwhile," she said.

At Duke, she intends to continue performing and studying music, but also wants to learn about other fields — perhaps something else in the liberal arts, perhaps economics, perhaps ...

"I feel like in college I have so much more to explore," she said.