Clicks for Classical

We talk to Hayato Sumino by video call to Hiroshima, where he is giving a concert the following day. We have just under 15 minutes to get to know this exceptional young pianist. His schedule is tight, so he has retreated to a corner of the hotel lobby for our call. The artist, who has over 1.5 million followers on YouTube, comes across as calm and deliberated. On the internet, he is known as Cateen – a name he chose for himself aged 13 when he was a gaming and cat enthusiast. He grew up in Tokyo with two cats and was already tinkling away at the keys by the age of three. His mother is a piano teacher; his father works in the IT sector.

Even as a teenager, Sumino was posting videos featuring music from video games and arranging hard rock songs for the internet. His meteoric rise to fame in Japan happened in 2018, when he won one of the country’s most prestigious piano competitions. Shortly thereafter, classical music fans and newcomers to the genre the world over were left in awe: Sumino’s performance in the semi-finals of the prestigious Chopin Competition in Warsaw was streamed 45,000 times, setting a new audience record. Asked whether high click-through rates or packed concert halls are more important to him, he answers like a shot:

Last year, the pianist set a Guinness World Record for the highest number of tickets sold for a solo piano concert at the huge K-Arena in Yokohama: 18,546 people turned up to watch his live performance. And yet, according to BR-Klassik, this “remarkable virtuoso” almost became an engineer. Because he enjoys maths just as much as music, Hayato Sumino initially studied engineering in his home city of Tokyo. After completing his master’s degree, he is pursuing this interest in technology at IRCAM in Paris, a unique research centre for musical and technological innovation: just the right training ground for Sumino, who loves to explore sounds down to the smallest detail.

Freed from the pressures of performing live, he lets his love of experimentation run wild on social media. With great respect for traditional works, he draws on every means available to apply his own take on the music. He experiments with new timbres on various instruments and composes his own music, switching effortlessly between genres and highlighting various details of a composition. This carefree, unrestrained sense of play is infectious: Sumino’s 7 Levels of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” – Mozart’s variations ranging from simple to virtuosic – has long since racked up over 13 million views.

As he explains, Sumino derives his drive from a love of the unknown. He admires pianists such as Víkingur Ólafsson and Francesco Tristano, who combine classical and electronic music in surprising, innovative ways. But non-classical artists and from walks through cities such as Hiroshima equally provide the Japanese pianist with inspiration. He modestly remarks that his work is simply based on common sense: “Approaching things with curiosity is the best thing you can do.”

On 22 April, Sumino’s Sounds will be performed at the Isarphilharmonie for the first time. He shares the stage with the London-based Aurora Orchestra, conducted by Nicholas Collon and which performs without music stands and plays standing up. Sumino, who also does without sheet music for Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, is looking forward to performing with the ensemble, which he has so far only seen online.  Composing allows him to express his whole personality: “I sometimes drift far away and just feel free.” His performance at London’s Royal Albert Hall went viral not least because he surprised the audience with another instrument.