The blind, autistic piano genius – who happens to be the Queen's nephew

Telegraph

4 hours ago

Derek Paravicini cannot tell his right hand from his left or dress himself; he lives with two other people with severe learning difficulties who all receive round-the-clock care. The 45-year-old is totally blind and autistic after being born prematurely at 26 weeks and 1lb 8oz (less than 1kg). At the time, the chance of survival for children born that premature was just 55 per cent.
But, sat behind the piano, he is a master of all he surveys. A world-renowned concert pianist, he has performed around the world and has a fanbase of 500,000 followers across his social media platforms. He has perfect pitch – the capacity to identify each musical note by ear – can play two pianos at once and has become known as the 'human iPod' for his ability to reproduce and riff on any piece of music he has ever heard. With regular visits to dementia care homes and schools – where he takes requests – his repertoire covers everything from Glenn Miller's 1937 hit Don't Sit Under The Apple Tree to video game theme tunes.
Now, he is the subject of a short film, Key of Genius, which premiered in London on June 21 this year. It tells the story of his first encounter, in 1985, with Adam Ockelford, who was working at a Wimbledon school for blind children. The teacher was giving a girl named Kelly a piano lesson, when a five-year-old Paravicini, visiting with his parents, made his presence known. He let out a squeal, before shoving Ockelford in the back.
Both remember the encounter to this day. 'And then I pushed Kelly off the stool and started to play Don't Cry for Me Argentina,' Paravicini recalls.
As a young child, Ockelford tells me, Paravicini played 'in this very, what should I say, unorthodox way'. This involved assaulting the keys with knuckles, head and karate-style 'chops and elbows', having taught himself on a toy organ his nanny had brought down from the loft. In fact, when Ockelford asked to tutor him at home, his father said it was not possible. The piano he had moved on to had been wrecked.
That was exactly 40 years ago, but Paravicini and Ockelford are still playing together. Ockelford is now professor of music at the University of Roehampton and founder and chair of The Amber Trust, which provides blind and partially sighted children with the opportunity to have music remake their lives, by funding lessons, instruments, software and travel.
I meet the duo at Ockelford's south London home where they convene weekly for a session with another autistic student, 24-year-old Romy Smith.
For Paravicini's party trick, I am asked to play four random notes on the piano. 'I can do that,' he exclaims, in his singsong voice, before instantly turning them into a jazzy piece he tells me is called 'the Etan Blues'.
It is all a long way from his early days when he refused to allow Ockelford to touch his own piano. The teacher resorted to picking up and dropping Paravicini on the other side of the room, allowing Ockelford a few seconds of tinkling before the child prodigy barged him back out of the way.
'Then I think it dawned on you that this was quite a good game,' says the 66-year-old. 'And then you realised you could actually have a relationship that involved music rather than fists. The essence of the film is absolutely right, that it was just this eureka moment for Derek. He suddenly realised, here was his window on to the world, and other people.'
Ockelford believes Paravicini's talents are so exceptional that there are 'maybe half a dozen in the world like him'. But such exceptionalism can be a burden. The 1988 Oscar-winning film Rain Man – which featured an autistic savant played by Dustin Hoffman – created a pervasive stereotype that equates neurodivergence with genius, something that many in the community have described as suffocating. Ockelford says: 'Derek's unusual, unlike Rain Man, in that he's autistic and also has severe learning difficulties. He's the first person with severe learning difficulties anywhere in the world, as far as I know, who's had a kind of a public international life. He's regarded as something of a hero amongst the autism community.'
Forty per cent of children born blind go on to develop perfect pitch. Paravicini's autism also gave him an interest more in the 'qualities of sounds, rather than what they meant', as well as a hyper-focus, allowing him to spend hours every day practising the same thing.
'With Derek, you can't really separate ability and disability,' says Ockelford. 'They're different sides of the same coin.' Paravicini can play all day quite happily, alighting from a 13-hour flight to the US straight into rehearsals. Ockelford once detected Paravicini's chords 'getting a bit repetitive, and I noticed he had fallen asleep!'.
It says something about Paravicini's talent that it overshadows his lineage – his mother Mary Ann is the sister of Andrew Parker Bowles, making the Queen his aunt by marriage. (He is also the great-grandson of novelist W Somerset Maugham and great-great-grandson of charity founder Dr Barnardo).
Paravicini's family have not always wholeheartedly welcomed the royal connection to the pianist, though. In 2007, the late Telegraph interviewer Cassandra Jardine reported that his mother was 'mildly huffy at what she calls the 'Camilla-isation/caramelisation' of her gifted son'. Mary Ann said: 'It's all Parker Bowles this and that. But I don't mind, if it draws attention to him. I'm just so delighted that he's having such fun playing concerts and raising thousands of pounds for charity.'
But Her Majesty has always taken a close interest in Paravicini's achievements. 'She's a good aunt, isn't she, Derek,' says Ockelford. The Queen is also president of The Amber Trust and, on taking up the role in 2012, said: 'I have followed the progress of their outstanding work with blind children for many years and I hope that my involvement will enable the charity and the children it supports to fulfil their ambitions in the coming years.'
In 2023, the Queen invited Olivia Taylor – a blind seven-year-old who has been helped by the Trust and who sang as part of a choir in the King's Christmas broadcast – to tea at Windsor Castle. Earlier in the same year, she appeared close to tears after hearing Lucy Illingworth, the blind 13-year-old who won Channel 4's The Piano and another Amber alumna, at the Coronation Concert at Windsor Castle. (Ockelford discovered Lucy aged four while she was playing at her school.)
Royal patronage may help raise a charity's profile, but Ockelford says disability is the great leveller. 'It cuts right across society. Derek can play for the Queen or he can play for some kids in a pupil referral unit. It's the same thing.' He is sure Paravicini's privileged upbringing is 'completely incidental. I work with kids who come from every conceivable background, including from areas of high social deprivation.'
Paravicini's sister, Libbet, nine years his senior, was the first person to recognise his musical gift when she heard him bashing out a hymn from church. She rushed to get her parents, but 'when I was saying, 'Play it again', he didn't understand.' The family would have to wait until he did Just One Cornetto from a TV advert.
Had their nanny never salvaged the plastic organ, 'there would have been no way to get the energy out,' notes Libbet. 'He'd have been like so many other children that we've known over the years, who do get very frustrated and then sometimes aggressive.'
She says it remains to this day 'a head scratcher' how, unlike a blind pianist such as Stevie Wonder – who always keeps his fingers on the keys – Paravicini can lift his high up in the air and then slam them down on exactly the right notes. 'I say, 'You're showing off, aren't you?' And he says, 'Yes'.'
Libbet, who chaperones her 'immaculately mannered' brother around the globe, says she is 'of course really proud. But also so used to that it's Derek, and this is what Derek does'.
Hollywood writer-director Daniel Persitz became aware of the story after his mother sent him a YouTube clip of Paravicini playing. Persitz – who is also a classically trained violinist with the Santa Monica Symphony – read Ockelford's memoir of their musical relationship (also titled in the Key of Genius) and 'fell in love with the story', which he says 'felt like an underdog sports movie in a way'.
The film of their partnership was made after Persitz crowdfunded £25,000 and scoured the US for a blind boy to take the lead role. But eight-year-old Cannon Wood did not play the piano, leaving Ockelford having to attempt a six-week crash course over Zoom. British actors Gavin Stenhouse and Lauren Samuels play Ockelford and Mary Ann.
Persitz's meetings with Paravicini shaped the sound design, which he wanted to reflect the savant's hyperawareness. 'He hears us speaking, he hears cars outside, he hears the hum of a motor over there and it's almost like a superpower,' says Persitz on a video call from his home in LA.
The journey has been a long haul. In 2017, his script featured on the Black List, the prestigious annual rundown of the top-rated unproduced screenplays, based on a survey of Hollywood executives. The 12-minute short is intended as a stepping stone to a feature-length version, the script for which was worked on by David Seidler, Oscar-winning writer of The King's Speech, before his death last year.
The film makes clear, and Ockelford is the first to admit, that the learning has always gone in two directions. Paravicini has taught him as much – about music and humanity – as he was ever able to impart to his student.
'I've got a PhD in applied musicology,' he says, 'but it's not nearly as challenging as figuring out a non-speaking little child who doesn't seem to relate to the world. The child may block you out for years.' (Paravicini, for instance, spent years treating words 'like music' that he enjoyed repeating, only beginning to 'grasp the full significance of language in his late teens').
Paravicini has also been a trailblazer for other gifted musicians. The Amber Trust was founded off the back of his work with Ockelford and through it Paravicini mentored and befriended Illingworth, and The Piano 's latest star, Chapman Shum, 14.
Another of Paravicini's protégés, Romy, may be autistic and non-verbal but – playing a version of the 40-year-old 'copy game' – is conducting the entire room like a maestro.
I leave the pair communicating to each other via two adjacent pianos, relishing a frenetic, improvised conversation through the keys – without a word needing to be spoken.