One-time Cypriot prodigy still floating on music

A man plays the violin in this September 19, 2006 file photo.

NICOSIA (Reuters Life!) - If you've ever wondered what preoccupies the mind of a musical prodigy, Michalakis Yiasemides doesn't mind telling you that it's music, music and only more music.

"You are talking to me now but I can't hear conversation, I hear music," said Yiasemides, whose friends have made a bid to get him into world record books as the most ambidextrous, self-taught musician and a master on 30 instruments.

At 85, Yiasemides looks much younger. He is sipping beer at 10 in the morning for a start, and frequently lapses into song - which has nothing to do with the beer.

Catapulted into the public eye on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus at the age of five, Yiasemides learnt the violin just by watching his father, a violinist and music instrument maker.

Taking the instrument in his hands one day, he played a chord. His excited father took him out to display his prowess in the village coffee shop in 1928. Then five-year-old Michalakis played the Greek national anthem, and the rest is history.

By the time his musician brothers brought him to the capital Nicosia to play for the crowds at the age of seven, he was earning twice as much as his siblings and touted as a boy wonder.

"I can play 30 musical instruments, but if anything else comes along I can master it," says Yiasemides. "It's not a matter of hours, it's a matter of minutes."

It's enough to make the uninitiated green with envy; "Either you have it or you don't. It's a gift from God that you just can't buy," he told Reuters.

Yiasemides says the violin is the most difficult for anyone to master. "It's the king of instruments. Someone really can't learn unless they have the ear for it. The piano is like the typewriter," he says.

Over seven decades of going through philharmonics, orchestras, bands, playing solo and inventing his own string instrument, the "Yiasemaki", Yiasemides is still going strong. He played at an art gallery last week, and still performs at weddings.

His favorite composers are Mozart who is "easy on the ear", Bach, who was more of a master "but a bit heavy" and Beethoven's "beautiful symphonies."

"There are some good compositions out there today, but a lot of it is rubbish," he says.

Friends say he does not get the recognition he deserves. "I don't think there is another individual quite like him who can play so many instruments to perfection," says life-long friend Photos Photiades, a prominent Cypriot businessman. "We have made an application to put him in the Guinness Book of Records."

Yiasemides says he will never give up his music. "Its my life, music is like the air that I breathe," he says. "If music wasn't there, I would probably not exist."

(Editing by Paul Casciato)