Saketh, 16, Named an RSL High Achiever for South India in Grade 3 Classical Piano
Saketh Sriram is sixteen, and the hardest of the three pieces he played for his Grade 3 classical piano exam was a Nocturne, a slow, songlike piece by the American composer Mona Rejino. The part that took longest was the timing. His teacher recorded him playing it. He listened back, adjusted, recorded it again, and after a few rounds, he says, “it finally clicked.” The exam, with RSL, a London music exam board, earned him a Distinction in September 2025. Then in January 2026 RSL’s India office wrote to Trill Route, his music school in Bangalore: his mark had placed him on the board’s High Achiever list for South India, the recognition it gives to the candidates with the highest marks in a grade.
Saketh is in Class 11. He has been a student at Trill Route, a contemporary music school in Indiranagar, since March 2024, first for guitar and a music production course, and from that September for piano. RSL is best known for its Rockschool grades in rock and pop. It also runs a classical syllabus, RSL Classical, with graded exams from an entry level called Debut up to Grade 8, and Grade 3 is the one Saketh took.
Where it began
Saketh’s musical education began with Carnatic music, the classical tradition of South India. He has been learning it for about five years and continues to, and it was learning Carnatic, he says, that made him curious about Western classical music, and eventually about the piano. What he loves most about playing the piano is “how expressive it feels once you actually get a piece right.” Away from music, his other interest is heritage photography.
His first piano lessons at the school, in September 2024, were not classical at all. They were Hanon finger exercises, scales and arpeggios, and two Rockschool songs, Keane’s Somewhere Only We Know and Adele’s Skyfall. The Nocturne came in February 2025, and with it the decision to sit a classical grade.
The three pieces
An RSL Classical exam at Grade 3 asks for three pieces from the syllabus list and technical work alongside them. Saketh’s was a video exam, so the whole set was recorded and sent to an examiner to mark. His three were the Nocturne; A Model of the Universe, Jóhann Jóhannsson’s theme from the film The Theory of Everything; and Sniffing Around, a short, playful piece by Teresa Richert. He learnt them with two teachers at the school: Ephrem Jones Pereira, who started the pieces with him, and Hang Khanen, who prepared them with him for the exam. By May 2025 the lessons included video recordings of the pieces, and from June they became what he calls mock run-throughs, the three pieces and the technical work played in sequence as they would be for the examiner. The feedback in those lessons, he says, was “clear, specific”, and it “helped me know exactly what to focus on.”
The award
The examiner’s report called it “a confident and assured performance” and found the phrasing and dynamics “shaped with sensitivity, creating clear character in each piece”. The certificate in the photograph is not the Grade 3 certificate itself. It is a second one RSL gives to the candidates who top their grade in a region, and his reads Classical Piano, Grade 3, South India, 2025. “I was thrilled to get a High Achiever award. It made all the practice worth it,” Saketh says. “I’m most proud of how much my timing and musicality have improved because of continuous practice.”
Congratulations, Saketh - Grade 3 with Distinction, and a High Achiever award for South India.
What comes next
The composers Saketh keeps coming back to are Ludovico Einaudi and Chopin, and wanting to play more of their pieces is, he says, “what keeps me motivated to keep getting better on piano.” The next piano exam is Rockschool Grade 5, in RSL’s contemporary syllabus. He has worked through three of its songs, Vanessa Carlton’s A Thousand Miles, Owl City’s Fireflies and Massive Attack’s Teardrop, and Randy Newman’s You’ve Got a Friend in Me came into the lessons in July 2026. On guitar, which he has learnt at the school since before the piano, he has played his way from Hallelujah to Hotel California and Sweet Child O’ Mine, and is preparing his first Rockschool guitar grade. Carnatic continues alongside both. And in his piano lessons this summer he began a piece from well beyond either exam, from the Grade 8 book: Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.
Piano and keyboard lessons at Trill Route are one to one or in pairs at the centre in Indiranagar, and online. Piano and keyboard lessons at Trill Route
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