Moses Lake piano student earns prestigious award

MOSES LAKE — Donald Lester knows a thing or two about hard work.

A graduate with Moses Lake High School’s Class of 2020, Lester also earned another diploma this spring — a highly coveted Paderewski Award from the American College of Musicians and the National Piano Teachers Guild.

The diploma is no easy thing to earn. It requires 10 years of work, memorizing a new set of different piano pieces each year and playing them for professional judges.

“I’ve been playing ever since I was 4 years old,” said Lester, now 18. “It takes a long time to memorize, I think it’s all muscle memory. It’s definitely a long process.”

The Paderewski Award is one of a number of music awards worldwide named after Polish pianist and composer Ignacy Jan Paderewski, who served for a time as the country’s prime minister following World War I.

Lester said for his last high school competition, he memorized 10 pieces — including a sonata by Beethoven, a Chopin prelude and a rag by Scott Joplin — to demonstrate his fluency in a variety of music styles spanning the last 300 years or so.

“You have to have a mix of pieces through all the eras of music to prove that you actually understand how to play all the different styles,” he said.

In his precise and logical way of counting and tracking things, Lester said this year’s memorization program involved 58 pages of music amounting to “1,353 measures.” In addition, this year Lester said he had to play a number of scales and arpeggios, identify chords and scales, and sight-read a piece of music he’d never seen before selected by a guild judge.

To vie for the Paderewski Award, a pianist must be a student of a guild-certified piano teacher and must be recommended by that teacher. According to Lester’s mother Cindy, for his first 13 years, the young piano prodigy studied with Wenatchee-based Linda Butler, and then after she retired, with Therese Bertrand in Moses Lake.

“They give the Paderewski to anyone that can manage 10 years of a minimum of 10 pieces,” Cindy said. “You can see it’s hard because most people don’t study piano that long, or get good enough.”

Normally, piano students perform live for guild judges. But in the year of the COVID-19 outbreak with its school closures and the demand for social distancing, everything was different, according to Lester’s father, who is also named Donald and who is a cybersecurity engineer for Grant County Public Utility District.

Lester was able to record his performances this year, the senior Lester said.

“We got a judge in Spokane to give us criteria for each specific recording, and it was all stuff he would have done live,” Lester’s father said.

The younger Lester said he likes to play the piano because he finds it a challenge to master.

“It’s a complicated instrument. It’s one of the most complicated instruments in the world,” he said. “It is a reputation statement to be able to play such an instrument.”

But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t get joy out of playing music.

“There is a bit of joy when you complete your objective, when you complete the guild program,” he said. “When it’s all over you’re generally happy with it.”

Lester also likes to perform, winning his class at the Marysville Strawberry Festival’s talent show in 2017, drawing crowds when he tickles the ivories of keyboards on display, and when he has practiced publicly at the Pybus Market in Wenatchee, the father said.

“That was rather unexpected,” Lester said of his win at the Strawberry Festival. “There was a lot of good competition, a lot of musicians, there as well.”

Lester did a year of Running Start at Big Bend Community College during his final year in high school, and said he intends to complete his associate’s degree in the next year before transferring to Eastern Washington University in Cheney, where he hopes to double major in both music and computer science.

“It’s all logical and makes sense,” Lester said of computer science. “Every bit of code that you write, it performs its intended purpose, hopefully, every single time you run it.”

“Finding out why it doesn’t is part of the experience,” he added.

Both music and computer programming are logical and orderly in a way that Lester said really appeals to him.

“A note on the piano is always the same. Unless something breaks,” he said.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at [email protected].