The keyboard skills of this ten-year-old virtuoso pianist will blow your mind

3 April 2017, 14:58

A piano star of the future? We reckon so. Here's Peter Leung’s wonderfully expressive and technically bang-on performance of Aaron Copland's ‘The Cat and the Mouse’ at the 2016 Oxford Piano Festival. And he's not yet a teenager.

Immensely talented at the keys and, by the looks of this video, lots of personality - we think this prodigy could be in for very big things. Peter Leung is one of international superstar Lang Lang’s personally selected Young Scholars, and performed this stunning rendition of Aaron Copland’s challenging piano work 'The Cat and the Mouse' at the 2016 Oxford Piano Festival.

A fourth grader from Hong Kong, Peter says his dream is to play the piano so that he can “bring hope and joy to people all over the world”. With a huge amount of competition prizes under his belt already, and with the support of Lang Lang, he is very much on his way to achieving this fantastic goal. Go him.

Here's Peter with an introduction and an excerpt of Copland's explosive piano miniature:

‘The Cat and the Mouse’ was the first of Copland’s pieces to be published, and is based on the humorous poem ‘The Old Cat and the Young Mouse’ by Jean de la Fontaine. The poem tells the story of a young mouse caught by an old cat, who remains unmoved by the young mouse’s appeals for freedom. You can really hear the cat slowly stalking the mouse, while the mouse nervously scampers up and down the keyboard.

Here's the composer's reading of his piece, in full:

Aside from being technically spectacular, we think young Peter’s playing shows a huge amount of expression and feeling, with the clear musical understanding akin to that of a much older pianist. We can’t wait to hear what the future has in store for this burgeoning star.