I sat there in awe, rendered immobile by sonic delight, as I listened to her practice her program for an upcoming show at Carnegie Hall.  At first, I could only focus on her fingers, as they gently cascaded onto and then along the black and white keys. Then, I felt compelled to move my body back and forth in sync with her own as I listened to her inhalations, followed by her deep exhalations as she played.

To watch her masterful use of this piano was to enter into a musical trance with her. I lost track of the time, for the first time in years, and it was magical.

Sandrine Erdely-Sayo, a French-Hungarian former child prodigy pianist from Perpignan, France has resided in Port Richmond for the past seven years with her French immigrant mother, Danielle, and two baby grand pianos.  Her house is like a museum dedicated to piano greats such as Liszt, Thalberg and Chopin.  Busts of these musicians, as well as framed photos of them and others, provide her with inspiration and focus. But, to watch her and to listen to her musical genius is to enter into a world that one would not imagine exists inside this tiny rowhouse on Almond Street, a house chosen because the street name made her very happy.  “The realtor drove me by and said: ‘this is the house,’ and I liked it,” Erdely-Sayo remembers.  “The house had a good energy.”

Known as Frenchie on her block, neighbors are happy to keep an eye on her house when she is away at concerts and “they don’t mind the music.”  But, who would?  It’s peaceful, contemplative and unlike pop music, it allows one to escape into worlds created by geniuses, Erdely-Sayo being one of them, as she is a member of the Mega Society, a high IQ society whose entrants have scored at the one-in-a-million level on a test for general intelligence.

Erdely-Sayo came to the United States in 1990, at the age of 22, to study with another master pianist and Philly native, Susan Starr, at the University of the Arts, where she received her Master’s Degree in piano and composition.  But, her piano playing started well before that, just after she began to speak, and is now one of the many languages through which she communicates.

“[I’ve been playing piano] since I was four years old,” Erdely-Sayo noted.  “My mother was playing and I wanted to play like her.” Her mother, formerly a Latin and French professor at the Universite de Perpignan, was Erdely-Sayo’s first piano teacher and was one of the many who enabled her to access the prodigy piano player that she had in her.  “I was extremely lucky to study with the goddaughter of Pablo Casal, Michèle Puig, at the Perpignan Conservatory in France.”  By age seven, Erdely-Sayo won gold medals in piano and chamber music and by age 13, she became the youngest recipient of the French Minister of Culture Prize.  By the next year, she wrote three pieces for chamber orchestra.  Within the decade, she was in the US, studying with Starr and beginning a prize- winning musical career that is still expanding today.

On Sunday, March 23, Erdely-Sayo will be performing at Carnegie Hall in NYC.  She will perform her favorites, Liszt, Thalberg and Chopin and 10 of her own compositions that she wrote to complement the stories from the book, Platero y Yo, written by Juan Ramon Jimenez, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for this book.  She has been collaborating with Elizabeth Peña, who will be narrating these stories in Spanish during the second half of her show.  (Along with Peña, Erdely- Sayo formed a duo entitled: Duo Musicaleph, which focuses on piano and literature.)

When not composing and performing, Erdely-Sayo teaches private piano lessons at Temple Prep, a music school that is part of Temple University and at The Lawrenceville School.