Is this Sault teen Canada's most promising musician?

Her friends call her driven, sassy, and "the greatest flirt in the world."

She's lived a charmed life, attending New York's Professional Children's School with Macaulay Culkin.

Now, CBC Radio is asking whether 19-year-old Saultite Berenika Dorota Zakrzewski might be Canada's most promising musician.

Appearing this morning on CBC

Zakrzewski is one of 25 young Canadian musicians selected from more than 200 applicants for Up And Coming, a cross-country series of concert programs.

The program featuring Zakrzewski airs immediately after the 11 a.m. news today (Tuesday) on CBC Radio One.

Host Jon Kimura Parker, himself an internationally renowned pianist, interviews each of the young performers and accompanies many of them in recital.

Listen on your computer, then vote

To listen live on your computer using Windows Media, click here.

CBC Radio is allowing its listeners to select one of the featured performers as Canada's most promising musician, offering a summer scholarship to The Banff Centre and an opportunity to make a demo CD to winner.

To vote online for Zakrzewski as Canada's most promising musician, click here.

What happened to her on a Toronto subway

Asked by the CBC recently about the most amazing thing that's ever happened to her, Zakrzewski described an almost-unbelievably lucky break at the age of 13 when she was travelling home on the subway with her sister from a Toronto concert.

The girls started discussing the concert with a couple sitting next to them. Zakrzewski's sister mentioned that Berenika was a pianist and would be performing herself later that year.

"The couple remembered the date - and came up to me before the performance and asked me where I would most like to study piano - because they were well off enough to send me wherever I wanted," she recalls.

The Juilliard School

Berenika selected New York's prestigious Juilliard School.

Not only did her new patrons agree to send her there, they also presented her with a concert grand piano.

"That is most definitely the most amazing and wonderful thing that has ever happened to me - I still don't believe it. Thank you Toronto's TTC," she says.

After completing The Juilliard's four-year program, Zakrzewski enrolled at Harvard University, where she's in the second year of studies under pianist and Mozart expert Robert Levin.

The campus newspaper, The Harvard Gazette, described her last year as one of "the stars of Harvard's creative firmament."

Zakrzewski's performance of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6 to welcome Harvard's newly inaugurated president was, the Gazette said, as fiery as the red-beaded gown she was wearing.

The concert you'll hear today

The performance to be broadcast today consists of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6 in D flat, as well as Paderewski's Caprice. It was recorded at the Royal Conservatory of Music's Ettore Mazzolini Concert Hall in Toronto.

Zakrzewski returned to Canada for the event from Poland, where she's currently on a six-month study leave.

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