British nine-year-old Alma Deutscher started playing the piano at two and the violin at three and now composes operas, having acquired an early taste for the trade by writing Nokia ring tones. Ten-year-old pianist Laetitia Hahn has been delighting German concertgoers with her Chopin and Beethoven for over three years. Five-year-old Ryan Wang, a fellow Canadian pianist, has performed at Carnegie Hall. The superstar in question, Kevin Chen, has already passed the country's piano teacher exam and is currently studying at the Royal Conservatory of Music. "Canada's piano superstar is eight years old," proclaimed the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) earlier this year. Welcome to the awe-inspiring age of young Mozarts who rattle off Chopin's tricky études as well as entire piano concertos. "When I was young, nobody played them until they were adults." "Today kids are recording the Chopin études at age 10," reports Kaplinsky. "It's the Olympic syndrome: records exist in order to be broken." Wanting to better the accomplishments of others is, of course, part of human nature, but thanks to this collectively competitive streak societies have advanced through the centuries. "Musicians are doing more advanced things at a younger age than ever before," says Yoheved Kaplinsky, a professor of piano at The Juilliard School in New York and head of its pre-college division. In the category of the extremely talented, Yuanfan has got plenty of youthful company. Now also a composer – his first piano concerto will be premiered in China later this year – as well as a BBC Young Musician piano winner, Yuanfan is clearly not just a technically brilliant player but also a talented artist. He reports practising a lot as a child, for no reason other than that he enjoyed it.
"I started playing the piano aged six," says Yuanfan, who was born in Edinburgh to Chinese parents. Then there's Rachmaninov's third piano concerto and Prokofiev's first piano concerto, which he's learning for engagements in China. Recently, Yuanfan Yang has been busy preparing for his upcoming Scotland tour, learning Chopin's Fantasie in F minor and piano sonatas by Beethoven and Rachmaninov, respectively.
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