Home-grown virtuoso
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formance.” Two years ago, he moved to Evanston to study with Almita Vamos, whose previous students include famed solo violinists Rachel Barton Pine and Jennifer Koh, as well as members of the Grammy Award-winning Ying Quartet and Pacifica Quartet.

So how does a kid growing up in Springfield fiddle his way into the rarefied world of topnotch classical music? The obvious place to look for an explanation is his family, and even a first glance tells you that Clayton’s crew is unique. Clayton, who is African American, was born in Washington, D.C., and was still an infant when he was adopted by a white couple from Springfield. The couple was already raising a daughter, Joli, adopted from Honduras.

Clayton’s hyphenated last name is a combination of theirs: They are Thomas Penrose and Dr. Michael Whitmore. That’s right — two men. “We have some interesting family portraits,” Clayton says. But don’t let the fact that Penrose plays cello and Whitmore plays the viola fool you. If you think their musical interests explain Clayton’s talent, you would be wrong.

The first thing you would notice when you meet Clayton in person is, well, nothing whatsoever. Like most adolescent boys, Clayton reveals for grownups no more than necessary. He’s polite and cooperative, but soft-spoken and bashful, crafting his answers to a reporter’s questions using the fewest number of syllables possible.

Georgia Hornbacker, a violin teacher who for seven years spent hours with Clayton every week, got excited when she heard that her former student would be featured on National Public Radio’s “From the top” — a weekly show that spotlights the best pre-college-age classical musicians in the nation. Hornbacker was not especially eager to hear him play; instead, she was counting on host Christopher O’Riley’s talent for enticing young musicians into a few minutes of repartee. “I wanted to hear him talk!” she says. She would not be disappointed. Clayton told O’Riley about his insatiable athletic shoe addiction, informed the radio audience that he was wearing Nike Dunks low-cut, and busted Penrose for not practicing his cello enough.

Then he dazzled the airwaves with a virtuosic exhibition of John Williams’ “Devil’s Dance,” from The Witches of Eastwick soundtrack.

Being a somewhat shy sneaker-collector is just part of what makes Clayton an average boy. He also plays sports — his Springfield pals knew him as a threat on the soccer field, both indoor and out, and as a shortstop and a pitcher who could bring the heat in the Springfield Southwest League. His dads, watchful of his valuable fingers, never let him play basketball competitively, but he still plays.

“Every time I spent the night at his house, we played basketball until late at night, then got up early and started playing,” says Garrett Belville, who has been “best friends since 4th grade” with Clayton.

Another friend, Greg Knox, calls Clayton “P-Dub” and says he lays down some amazing hip hop beats for their Garage Band project, Say What? “On one song, he does hip hop rap and a violin solo,” Knox says. Clayton’s MP3 player has a little bit of everything. “I have a lot of classical music on it, then hip hop and R&B, and some jazz,” he says. “A lot of the songs that I have on there are from, like, when I was in middle school and stuff. I just listen to a lot of the songs on my iPod because the songs help me remember about certain times in my life.” Now 16, he has his first serious girlfriend — another string player he met at the Music Institute of Chicago. In Evanston, he spends his free time hanging out with his friends, playing basketball in the park and drinking hot chocolate at Starbucks.

Also like a lot of kids, Clayton is spending the summer at sleep-away camp, though his has the title of Heifetz International Music Institute.

A prestigious and rigorous six-week-long program for advanced violin, viola and cello students, the brochure promises that students get two private lessons per week, plus chamber music coaching, performance opportunities and five hours of practice time every day. Clayton is honest. “Right now, I try to practice five hours a day,” he says, “but it usually ends up being four and a half to five.” He seems like a completely ordinary kid who just happens to be extraordinarily talented at violin.

“Every time I spent the night at his house, we played basketball until late at night.”

“That’s exactly how we describe him,” Penrose says.

He was advertised as a healthy African American newborn in the classified section of The Washington Blade, a newspaper catering to the gay community in the nation’s capital.

Penrose and Whitmore picked it up while they were spending a week sightseeing, visiting friends and attending the annual Gay Pride parade, in the spring of 1993. With daughter Joli then 16, almost grown, they had been considering adopting another child. They were afraid the baby in the ad would be unavailable by the time they got around to inquiring, a few weeks after they returned home. As it turned out, no one else had applied to adopt the little black boy.

Whitmore, the assistant director of emergency medicine at Passavant Area Hospital in Jacksonville, and Penrose, who retired from Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, began the tedious process of submitting to a home study and background checks, supplying references and taking classes. By the time all the paperwork had been processed, Clayton, who had been living with a foster family since birth, was already 7 months old. When Penrose and Whitmore finally got the green light to travel to D.C. to get Clayton, they got so lost in the suburbs that they arrived at the foster family’s home late at night. Due to the hour, their special bundle was presented without ceremony — a few items of clothing, a stuffed bear and a sleeping infant.

“That was maybe the most surreal moment in my life. You just pick up this baby, and there you are,” Penrose says. “He’s not yours one minute, and he’s yours the next.” His birth mother, who had two older children, had given him the name Daquan, which his dads kept as Clayton’s middle name. From the beginning, he was surrounded by music. His parents had amassed a vast library of classical recordings. Whitmore had played piano from age 6 through college, and as an adult had taken classes in violin repair. Still, both men were more consumers, rather than purveyors, of serious classical music, and that went double for Penrose: “I had lessons on Hawaiian guitar when I was 10, for about three weeks,” he guffaws.

Like most parents, they set out to expose their child to a variety of experiences and see what grabbed his attention. With Clayton, soccer and baseball caught on, but he refused to even try dance. When he started Suzuki violin classes at age 4, he was hooked.

Right away, Penrose noticed that Clayton seemed to experience music at a deeper level than most kids do — a trait that Penrose has learned is common among musically gifted children. “There’s something going on in their brains that makes the music even more wonderful to them than it is to us non-musicians, and Clayton had that,” Penrose says. He had fun practicing, he enjoyed going to his lessons, he played in tune, and he zoomed