Mickey Mouse method turns tinkling tots into virtual virtuosi

There's something Mickey Mouse about pianist Eleanor Wong Lee-yun's teaching methods. To help her younger pupils understand emotions she sends them home with cartoons to watch.

'The Lion King, Finding Nemo and especially Fantasia,' says the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts senior lecturer. 'Walt Disney is good because it shows lots of love and hate between animals. [The students] see this and they understand about life, birth and death, hatred and love.'

To understand Wong's techniques, it's important to remember that some of her pupils are as young as eight years old. Learning to play the piano may be just a matter of hitting the right keys at the right time in the right order, but Wong isn't teaching pupils to just play the piano.

With prodigies such as 15-year-old Rachel Cheung Wai-ching passing through the academy, she's trying to mould virtuoso performers who will be able to play on the world stage with their hearts as well as their fingers.

Despite the tender age of some of her students, Wong says many understand the emotions required for classical pieces by Chopin, Mozart or Haydn.

'Even a 10-year-old has experience of emotion,' says Wong, who has played the piano since she was seven. 'I encourage the kids to observe everything, even the colours of the leaves and the different greens. The observation gives them the imagination.

'I make an allegory with the happiness of having a new doll, say, or seeing a new baby, and I relate that to the music. It shows they can understand and that they have emotion - but, of course, not on our level. In class the other day one boy said to me, 'I'm Nemo, I'm looking for my father'.'