At 16 years old, he is also one of the youngest students to be accepted by the world-famous institution.

Mark, who has been playing the clarinet since he was nine years old, received the good news by telephone last week, ending a nail-biting month since he attended the live audition at the Lincoln Centre school.

After the triumph enjoyed by the Juilliard Student Symphony Orchestra at this year's Bermuda Festival, there is a strong possibility they will be invited back to play here.

And Mark could find himself playing with the visiting ensemble, as he now awaits the results of the orchestral audition which he also sat, along with his main examination.

"If I'm accepted for that, I could end up in a chamber group, or in the main orchestra -- it just depends where they decide to put me,'' he explains.

Paying tribute to his early training received in Bermuda, Mark, who is presently a pupil at the prestigious Purcell School of Music in London, says: "I had been studying recorder from a very early age with Doug Frith, and eventually had to choose between the flute and the clarinet.

"I couldn't seem to blow sideways, so when I was at Saltus, I chose the clarinet. If it hadn't been for my woodwind teacher, Ian Drummond, and the encouragement of Bill Duncan, I would never have got where I am today.

"I'm especially grateful to Mr. Duncan because he gave up a lot of his time to play as my accompanist in lots of school and church concerts.'' Acknowledging that schooling at Purcell is "very, very expensive'', Mark says he is grateful, too, for the financial support he has received from the Geoffrey Tankard Foundation and the Bermuda Arts Council.

Describing his audition at Juilliard as "quite daunting'', Mark was asked to supply a tape of his playing to the school, back in January, for their consideration.

"When they told me that I had been selected to attend a live audition, I had only ten days to learn the music from scratch, so I practised seven hours a day for all of those ten days!'' Considering that the set piece consisted of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto and that it had to be played from memory, this was no easy task.

"I was allowed to choose my other pieces, but I knew they would expect a very high standard, so I decided to go for something that was quite different from the normal run of audition pieces!'' With this strategy in mind, he settled on John Ireland's Fantasy Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, and Joseph Horowitz's Jazz Sonatina for Clarinet and Piano.

"When I arrived there, everyone I saw seemed to be in their 20s. I knew that they do accept juniors, but most kids in the States don't finish high school until they are 17 or 18.'' Mark, on the other hand, completed his GCSE `O' levels last summer in England -- and, in spite of a punishing music schedule, managed to pass all the eight subjects taken, four of them with a grade `A'.

So far, Mark, who also enjoys reggae and rock when he's not studying classical music, has not decided on his eventual career.

"If I'm good enough, sure, I would love to make music my profession, but the competition is intense, so we'll have to see!'' In the meantime, when he returns to the Purcell School for what will now be his last term (he had started his `A' levels), Mark will have to break the news that he's now bound for the city of New York.

"I think they'll be pleased. Purcell is a wonderful school and I'm very lucky to have gone there,'' he says of the institution that has produced, among others, cellist Robert Cohen and oboist Nicholas Daniels, both of whom are now making their mark in the highly competitive musical world.

Mark is the first to admit that his mother, lawyer Ms Keren Lomas, has been what he calls "the driving force from when I was very young. After her divorce, she was a single parent who had to work, so she was determined I would do something constructive after school, instead of just sitting in a nursery.

"So I did karate and music, and eventually decided to concentrate on the music, and my mother's been right behind me, supporting me all the way!'' MUSICAL SUCCESS -- Sixteen-year-old Bermudian Mark Lomas, soon to begin studies at the prestigious Juilliard School of Music.