Music chose me: Kit Armstrong at CMNW and OBF

The keyboardist, composer, and mathematician discusses his storied background; his performances of Bach and his own music at this year’s summer festivals; the church he bought in France; and why he never practices.

Originally Published in Oregon ArtsWatch July 2025

No way you can fit Kit Armstrong, 33, into a musical box. His achievements, ideas and reflections are too vast. He rarely holds still. And his improvisations — consider the Debussy-influenced “fish” encore he played after the Goldberg Variations on July 1 at Reed College’s Kaul Auditorium — are unpredictably astounding though he plays the pieces so breathlessly fast that you can’t keep up.

Slightly built, boyish with wire-rimmed glasses that he doesn’t wear all the time, he performed a number of pieces on several instruments at Chamber Music Northwest’s summer festival during its first week, June 28 through July 4. He wore a dark suit with a white collared shirt and black patent leather shoes each time he performed, which entailed five days in a row including an Oregon Bach Festival concert in Eugene.

He played the harpsichord in J.S. Bach’s two-part “Complete Brandenburg Concertos” opening night June 28 at Reed College’s Kaul Auditorium, and tore through a cadenza in the 20-minute Concerto No. 5 in D major,  BMV 1050. The audience clapped before the piece was over. The applause was mostly for him, though he was reluctant to take a bow until conductor Shunske Sato encouraged him. My colleague said the Oregon Bach Festival audience was equally impressed the night after when the musicians played the concertos in Eugene.

Two nights after the Portland “Brandenburg Concertos,” on June 30, Armstrong played the harpsichord in the “Brandenburg All-Stars” concert, also in Kaul. He shared the spotlight in Bach’s 19-minute Trio Sonata from the Musical Offering, BMV 1079 with flutist Emi Ferguson, renowned conductor/violinist Sato and cellist Edward Arron, who turned the piece into a quartet.

Then on July 1, one day later, he sat down at Kaul’s Steinway piano without a word of introduction and performed the 30 Goldberg Variations plus its bookending arias, all 75 minutes of them, without a note of music in front of him. (“The Variations” were a run-up appetizer to his fish improvisation.) How could he remember the order of all those notes? “It’s about pattern,” he said in an interview with me at his hotel a day after the concert. “The Variations,” he added, ”follow a certain logic.”

Armstrong is quite comfortable with patterns and logic. He was an all-star math student as a kid, teen-ager and young man in college, and has said that he thinks of himself as a mathematician rather than a musician. The British newspaper, The Guardian, called him a prodigy, and reported that Armstrong completed high school math at the age of 5. That article was published 19 years ago.

So in Armstrong’s view, “Music chose me.”

Composing at 5

Armstrong began composing before he was 5 years old, studying an abridged encyclopedia to get the hang of putting together notes. As a gift, he asked for all of Mozart’s symphonies. It was then that his mother, who was not musical, figured she should sign him up for piano lessons. He was still 5 years old and had begun reading the Wall Street Journal at 3 years old. He composed his first symphony at the age of 8. No wonder Armstrong has been called “the Mozart of our time.”

Eventually, he said, he managed to persuade his mother, who was born in Taiwan and worked as a Wall Street broker, “to think of music as pleasant rather than highly annoying.” (His British father from Kent, England, is no longer living.)

Armstrong, born in the United States, made his first public appearance on the David Letterman Show when he was 10, and was admitted to Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia at 12. “There were several of us who were that young,” he said, conscious of being modest. “We had our own juice club.”

About that age he studied with Portland Baroque Orchestra’s conductor/harpsichordist Julian Perkins in London and began to work with the late Alfred Brendel, who died in June this year at 94 years old. Brendel was a Czech-born Austrian classical pianist and poet. He met with Armstong five to 10 times a year in London when Armstrong was 12, and for years after.

“He was an instinctive musician,” Armstrong said about Brendel. “Feeling — refined through knowledge and experience of art and life — was a primary motivation for him. His instinct was referring to things he liked in art, film. literature and painting; they were a source of inspiration for the way he thought about music. He expanded my vision of what life could be. I came from a background of science. The real world is sufficiently interesting, I thought. But it is even richer with the view he had.”

Twelve years old was a big year for Armstrong. Along with attending Curtis and studying with such mentors as Perkins and Brendel, he made his debut at Carnegie Hall.

Nonstop plans

He has rarely stopped coming up with new ideas. In 2012, barely 20 years old, Armstrong bought a church in northern France near the Belgian border. The Church of Sainte-Thérèse-de-l’Enfant-Jésus in Hirson, France was about to be razed. It has 7,000 square feet with 80-feet-high ceilings, he said, translating the meters into feet for me.

The economy in that part of France was floundering, the region was poor, and officials were about to dynamite the church. “It had wonderful acoustics,” Armstrong said. “I thought, someone has to buy it. Why not me?”

The church didn’t cost much, but plenty of money and effort went into renovation and installing an organ. He hosts professional musicians, students and community groups in the building. One of his projects is working with students and teachers for “La Semaine De La Voix” (“The Week of the Voice”), where each class learns a different part of a piece. He hires teachers from northern Europe to teach the students.

Though he has the French church to manage and performs regularly around the world, he officially lives in Austria. He has places in Vienna and Salzburg, both cities known for their music.

Little practice, many results

A night after he played the Goldbergs, he was wearing his dark suit and patent leather shoes at the informal “New at Night Global Voices” program July 2 at the Old Church. He performed two of his own compositions, including the 10-minute Fantasy on B-A-C-H, which he wrote 14 years ago. His hands ran up and down the piano’s keyboard like flowing water.

But guess what? He doesn’t practice, on which Soovin Kim, violinist and CMNW co-artistic director with wife/pianist Gloria Chien, asked him to elaborate in a pre-concert interview. “You don’t practice?” Kim asked in disbelief. “I think I practiced six hours a day, maybe more, from the age of 15 to 30!”

Nope. Armstrong has a phenomenal memory. He plays maybe an hour a day, he said, until he tires of listening to himself. He has a visual memory and an astonishing ability, like Mozart, to sightread music. He has an easy time reading music and a harder time listening to it. He compares the process to reading and listening to Shakespeare: He believes it’s a bigger challenge to listen to Shakespeare’s plays when performed and to make sense of them, than it is to read and to comprehend them.

In our interview, he preferred not to talk about his gifted and prodigy labels because, as he said, “It’s difficult to talk about being gifted without being conceited.”

But he has no trouble admitting that he has a charmed life. “I am a happy person. Personal happiness has a lot to do with the fact that I’m lucky and in a luxurious position. I have the freedom to do what I like doing, and things that are worth doing, not at someone else’s bidding. Some musicians don’t have that feeling and have to respond to others’ expectations.”

A free man, and a gifted one.