HOW hard is it these days to become a top-ranking concert soloist? And can you also have a personal life?

I had a chance to find out when I talked to the 27-year-old Canberra pianist, Edward “Teddy” Neeman, during a current visit home, where he will be a finalist in the Southern Highlands International Piano Competition on October 9 and soloist for Grieg’s Concerto in A minor with Canberra Symphony Orchestra on October 19-20.

A familiar figure in Canberra music scene since migrating to Canberra with his family from the United States at age 14, “Teddy”  originally studied piano while a teenager with the ANU School of Music’s Larry Sitsky, who advised him to do his final secondary studies at Narrabundah College, which would give him lots of personal time to explore his music.

He has won first prizes in the Rodrigo, Carlet and Kawai international piano competitions and has performed with orchestras including the Prague Philharmonic, the Madrid Philharmonic, the Sydney Symphony, Melbourne Symphony, West Australia Symphony and The Queensland Orchestra.

As well as finding time to perform in New York City, at the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall and the Alice Tully Hall, his performance of the Concierto para piano by Joaquín Rodrigo was released on CD by the Rodrigo Foundation in 2011. Neeman has been working on his  doctorate at New York’s Juilliard School for the past two years after moving to the US  in 2006 to study with Solomon Mikowsky at the Manhattan School of Music.

“It involves a lot of  research and writing about music,” he said. Now he’s finished his coursework but still has a thesis to write. “I think it really helped me as a musician to explore music from a more intellectual, scholarly perspective, but I’m trying to do more actual music-making these days.”

But if you think he’s too busy for a personal life, think again. En route to Australia he married his Indonesian fiancée Stephanie in Bali on July 27. She’s also a concert pianist studying for her doctorate.

Neeman is well into his thesis about improvisation and he can do that away from the Juilliard.

“The scholarly demands are similar to another university – it must be a substantial paper,” he says. Here in Australia he’s been doing a lot of reading, but plans to interview improvisation experts like Melbourne composer Allan Walker. To date improvisation hasn’t figured very much in his practice, although he does his own ornamentation for Bach, but that’s pre-planned.

Now, instead of just hanging around in New York – “very tough and you have to be on your toes all the time” – he’s heading for Cincinnati, Ohio in late October, where his wife Stephanie has already flown to continue her PhD studies at the College-Conservatory of Music. Once there, he will enrol in an artistic diploma which will  give him a framework, lessons and also a paying job as a teaching assistant.

It’s the first time in years been free at this time of the year to enter the piano competition or perform, and he’s enjoying it.

The Grieg that he’s playing with the Canberra Symphony Orchestra as one he played a long time ago when he was very young. “It’s on my concerto list…they looked at that on the website when they decided what they wanted a concert based on Scandinavian themes.”

So how does he live? Well, apart from learning new works, which he calculates at about the rate of 20-30 minutes of music a month, he shares interests in restaurants, ballet, reading and exercise with Stephanie, who is more of an extrovert and seems to know everybody at the Juilliard, where she studied for a time.

Life in Australia seems to be a mixture of music and maths. Neeman’s  father is a mathematician and his mother a statistician. His younger brother Joe is now studying statistics at Berkeley but keeps up a fairly cracking pace as a violinist. Even younger brother Jeremy, 21, is taking guitar lessons and, along with Joe, provided the music at the Bali wedding.

“I’m really feeling optimistic at the moment,” Neeman says, “and I’m really looking forward to Cincinnati.”

Edward Neeman’s plays Grieg with the Canberra Symphony Orchestra in  Llewellyn Hall on October 19-20, bookings to 13 28 49.