Comb the annals of history in order to find out the true origins of the joke “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” and you’ll come up with almost as many answers as the number of times the question has been asked. The famous punchline “Practice, practice, practice” has been attributed to everyone from the violinist Jascha Heifitz to the violinist Mischa Elfman. Others give credit to vaudevillians, while some think the joke had its origins with Borscht Belt humor from the Catskills.

While there still seems to be no solid answer to how this joke came into being, one fact underlines a serious truth: Carnegie Hall remains a showcase for the best talent in the world, and continues to be associated with those who have earned the right, through endless hard work, to grace its stage.

Pianist Nana Miyoshi is just such an artist. At seventeen she has already been honing her talents for more than a decade, having begun her piano studies at age three.  And if we are to subscribe to Malcolm Gladwell’s theory that it takes 10,000 hours of intensive practice to achieve mastery of complex skills, Nana may soon have to start a new timecard, having logged in at least that many hours already.

Hers, like many of the artists introduced to The Alexander & Buono Competitions, is a story whose template belongs to the lives of all of the artists who work to launch careers.  The endless hours of practice are paired with an ongoing journey of self-discovery and the need to find out how to come as close to perfecting one’s craft as possible, right along with determining how strong and how high are the levels of commitment needed to stay the course in order to achieve not just the one goal of a Carnegie performance, but a career with the potential to last decades.

Nana won the Bradshaw & Buono International Piano Competition at age eleven. Performing Mozart’s Piano Sonata in F major, K. 332 as part of the Carnegie Hall Winners’ Recital, she showed herself to be not just musically thoughtful, but mature beyond her years. She also shared that her goal was to be a concert pianist who played all over the world, something that might be thought to be a bit of childlike fantasy in one so young, until you start to speak with her.

During a discussion with her mother, Kaori Miyoshi, they set forth a clear plan of goals and career aspirations, and then asked Cosmo Buono if he would take her on as a student. Buono carefully laid out the logistics of such a plan, knowing that it would require lessons via Zoom between New York and Tokyo, but a two-year pandemic, which had made such lessons a way of life, proved a less daunting task than it might otherwise have been, even with a fourteen-hour time-difference.

“I was happy to take on the challenge of teaching Nana for a variety of reasons,” says Buono. First, it is not often one sees such a clear focus and I could also tell as I spoke with her mother, that this was clearly a choice Nana was making, and that her parents were only responding to their child’s wishes. The dream was Miyoshi’s and hers alone. The years since 2019 have convinced me, over and over again, that all my instincts were right.”

While the lessons did begin via Zoom, Nana began coming to New York with her mother periodically to study with Buono, but also to travel and understand the world. Staying anywhere from one to two months at a time, mother and daughter became two of the most informed New York tourists there could be, taking in everything from cavernous museums in Manhattan like the Metropolitan and Guggenheim, to tiny pizza parlors in Brooklyn, and everything in between.

Her mother, a teacher who home schools Nana, explains these visits quite clearly. “It is important for Nana to understand not just music, but the world. Her father and I want to make sure that her life is as balanced as possible, so we take her everywhere and help her to plan concerts in Japan so that she has the experience of playing as much in public as possible.”

And play she does. With Buono guiding her musical education, carefully selecting repertoire for her that gradually builds and strengthens technique while polishing her interpretive skills, she is giving performances in her native Tokyo and cities like Kagawa, along with those arranged for her by the Alexander & Buono Foundation in the United States, to pair with her extended study visits. She has also played in Turkey with the Mersin State Opera and Ballet Orchestra under the baton of Nezih Seçkin, conductor and music director of Ankara State Opera and Ballet, and returned three years later by special invitation from Naci Özgüç, chief conductor of the Ankara State Opera and Ballet Orchestra, to perform the Grieg Concerto in A-minor.

The first US performances came almost three years after the collaboration began, as this was time devoted to her being, to quote Buono, “an artist in training.” ABF featured Nana in their Annual ABC Gala Concert, which celebrated women in the arts, and had as its honoree Ruth Slenczynska, the then 97-year-old pianist who had played for four US Presidents and First Lady Michelle Obama, and who just a few months earlier had released a new recording on the Decca label. The evening was a true source of inspiration for Nana, as she saw in Slenczynska a template for long-term success. In June of the same year she also made her New York Recital debut on Manhattan’s West Side at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music, where she played Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, Gershwin, and Liszt to a full house of enthusiastic parents and their children, many of them aspiring pianists as well.

Nine months later she returned to the United States, this time performing at The Church, the internationally celebrated arts center founded by April Gornik and Eric Fischl in Sag Harbor, New York. By this time Buono had chosen to work with her on repertoire he knew would otherwise might not be in her purview for some time, so in addition to Beethoven, as well as Clara and Robert Schumann, she performed a sonata by African American composer Florence Price and an impromptu by the British mixed race composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, with Buono maintaining he wanted “further round out her artistry with an understanding of musical idioms that were not outside the bounds of classical repertoire, but in fact helped to add to it.

In each of these concerts Nana distinguished herself brilliantly. The time and attention she and Buono paid to the aspects of nuance, musicality, and technique were obvious, and there was a clear pattern of artistic growth taking place.

In November of 2023 she came to New York again, but this time with slightly different objectives, as she was here to primarily work on getting used to having the experience of doing live recordings.

Buono arranged for her to go into a recording studio to make video recordings of a few curated works from her ever-growing repertoire list. By this point, with a number of live performances in both Japan, Europe, and the United States as a foundation of experience on which she could draw, she recorded pieces by Chopin, Liszt, and Schumann—each of them in one take.

When asked how she was able to do this Nana had a simple but very wise answer. “Mr. Buono has taught me that when I am practicing I must make very sure to know exactly what I want to do and say with every measure. I study the score in very small pieces and then put it all back together. When I perform before an audience I know everything I want to say about the work, and then I just say it. For me it was the very same even with three cameras running.”

This strategy has made for any number of successes to date, and is part of what she is using to plan her return to Carnegie. Buono maintains that waiting until next year for the debut has less to do with skill than wisdom and life experience. “Every artist needs to grow into the works she performs by simply living life, while also gaining an understanding of the influences on the composers themselves, and what led them to write in the way they did. That takes time, and a lot of life experience away from the keyboard, which has to be brought back to it in order to do any composer’s works justice.”

Spending as much as three months New York each year for both performances and in-person study with Buono, she was heard in concert at the famed Kosciuszko Foundation Auditorium in June of 2024, performing works by Beethoven, Chopin, Granados, Liszt and Piazzolla. Her recital there was followed by a second appearance at Carnegie Hall in November of 2024 as Special Guest Artist for the Sixteenth Annual ABC Gala Concert, where she played works by Gershwin and Liszt.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, certainly. Still, traveling a road that includes commitment, dedication, focus—with as much life experience as possible thrown in to the mix—goes a long way too.