Olivia Li is one of this music institute's most promising new students. She's 7 years old

PHILADELPHIA -- In the lobby of the Curtis Institute of Music’s Lenfest Hall, Olivia Li, in a frilly-sparkly red dress, is running back and forth through a turnstile. A few minutes later, she is at the piano transformed — playing Chopin eyes closed, a countenance most serious, and seemingly a decade more mature.

If her legs aren’t long enough for her feet to reach the piano’s pedals without an extender, give her time. She is 7 years old.

Olivia is one of nearly four dozen new students now arriving at Curtis for the fall term. The school on Rittenhouse Square, one of the world’s top music conservatories, has always had its share of young talent. This year it will have 13 musicians entering school under the age of 18.

But even at a place known for prodigies, Olivia is unusual. She is believed to be the youngest student to study at Curtis since 1950, when 6-year-old violinist Diana Halprin matriculated.

“I was actually preparing for Juilliard,” Olivia said, “but my teacher said I could try for Curtis, and I just did. I didn’t expect I would get in.”

She got in. Juilliard, too.

Asked why she chose Curtis, she said, simply, “I just like Curtis better than Juilliard.”

Michelle Cann, one of two professors with whom Olivia will study at Curtis (the other is Ignat Solzhenitsyn), says that the young pianist has “phenomenal fingers.” Then again, so did others who tried out for the school and did not get in.

For the current school year, Curtis received 154 applications to the piano department, a spokesperson said. Sixty-three of those auditioned live in the first round and 15 advanced to the finals. Four were eventually accepted.

What set Olivia apart in her audition, Cann said, was “how musical she was and how much personality and character about the music-making she had that you don’t expect to see in a 7-year-old. It just stood out so much.”

The sole criterion for admission at Curtis is artistic promise, said provost and dean Nick DiBerardino. “It’s rare for someone as young as Olivia to have won a place at Curtis,” he said, “but it does happen, and when it does, it’s because there was something really special happening at the piano.”

Curtis has had students younger than Olivia. The school is still in the process of reviewing its records, but to the best of its knowledge the youngest was pianist Ruth Slenczynska, who was 5 years and 2 months old when she arrived in April 1930. She stayed just a few weeks.

The youngest to come and stay was Sol Kaplan, who was 5 years, 7 months when he began studies in 1924, the year Curtis was founded; he went on to compose music for episodes of the original "Star Trek" TV series and a slew of movie scores.

Olivia is in exceedingly rare company. More than 4,000 composers, conductors, vocalists, pianists, and other instrumentalists have graduated from Curtis in its century-plus existence. Only 13 other students were under the age of 10.

She comes to Curtis from East Williston, Long Island. No one in her family is particularly musically inclined, said her mother, Yanan Zhang, who did study piano as a child and continued to play a bit on a digital piano the family had at home.

“She just naturally started,” said Zhang of Olivia’s attraction to piano. “She saw me playing, and we hired a teacher to come to home once a week to teach her. So initially it was just for fun.”

Olivia started studying with a teacher — a Yale and Juilliard graduate — who gave her “very systematic training. So from that time, we took the learning seriously,” said Zhang.

The teacher told Zhang that Olivia learned fast and had strong fingers.

“I think he told me several times that she is outstanding, but I didn’t really take it seriously. I thought it’s just encouragement from teachers — that’s how they encourage kids, encourage parents.”

Olivia was 4 when she started piano, and despite her quick progress, it didn’t occur to Zhang for a while that there was anything unusual about her daughter.

“I just thought maybe that’s how all kids do.”

Olivia, of course, is not like other children, and she won’t be like her fellow students at Curtis, either.

While students are taking coursework during the day covering music theory and history, Olivia will be attending third grade at Germantown Friends School. After her normal elementary school day, she will go to Curtis for two hours of piano lessons per week and receive individualized instruction in other areas like ear-training, music history, and repertoire studies.

Curtis requires students under the age of 18 to live with a parent or guardian, and so Zhang, who works remotely for a bank in risk management, has moved to Philadelphia and set up house locally. Olivia has a younger brother, who loves music but hasn’t yet taken up an instrument.

How does a 7-year-old integrate socially at a school where some students will be three times her age?

“We haven’t had a 7-year-old [recently],” said DiBerardino, “but our undergraduate students are very accustomed to playing music with younger people and making a deliberate effort to make them feel welcome.”

Some socializing will happen organically, DiBerardino said, but “we do have some structures in place to try to help with that process. We have a dedicated work study program for our undergraduate students who are trained by our student services team to be mentors or big brothers or big sisters. And we regularly check in on students like Olivia. So Olivia definitely would have that support.”

Outside of practicing, Olivia likes drawing, writing, math, and swimming.

“When she’s not practicing, she reads a lot,” Zhang said. “She holds a book when she is brushing her teeth.”

“I like to read fiction,” Olivia said.

Curtis doesn’t have a separate precollege program the way some other music conservatoires do. Olivia won’t be enrolled in a bachelor’s program, but, rather, a diploma program.

Several forks in the road lie ahead. She could end up continuing at Curtis post-high school, enrolling in the bachelor’s degree program. That means she could end up being at Curtis well over a decade, a prospect that has some Curtis professors joking that they’ll be retired by the time she graduates.

Olivia could also decide at some point that she’s gotten what she needed from Curtis and move on to another conservatory or music school.

Asked whether she would like to be a professional pianist, Olivia said she doesn’t know yet. She’s also interested in conducting, “because you get to, like, conduct a whole orchestra.”

Olivia could also decide that music isn’t where she wants to end up. “We don’t know if at some point she’ll say, ‘I don’t want to do this with my life.’ Who is supposed to know that at 7?” Cann said.

Zhang said she doesn’t have any thoughts on the matter.

For now, the artist herself seems content to let the end-game play out. She has plenty to do in the meantime. Of what she wants from a Curtis education, she said:

“I hope that I can play piano really good and learn a lot of pieces and share my music with the world.”