Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner 3-year-old Prodigy to Perform Mozart at Carnegie Hall

A 3 year old child won an International Competition for young artists and will perform works of Mozart at Carnegie Hall.

https://nypost.com/2021/06/02/3-year-old-piano-prodigy-set-to-perform-at-carnegie-hall/

"Xie added that his daughter, who turns 4 years old this month, was drawn to music because his family are big music-lovers — who play everything from classical to pop in their home and car."

I tried that for years with my own kids. Didn't work as I hoped.

I wonder what Mozart piece this child will perform in November. I certainly didn't hear any Mozart in the video.

Here she is in a recital from May.

I really want to know if she's *reading* the music that's up there on the stand! Ah, wait, in the article it says


But also


I think super young children (like, 2 y/o) have been known to learn how to read text, but I think it's usually a good bit later than that...

Either way, it's always fun to see this kind of precociousness in children.

But I don't like to play after them in recitals!

Wow... Nice playing and some nice pieces that isn't from the Suzuki Books for a change. The repertoire sounded very original. Haven't come across too many talented kids like her. A few people in my family have taken music lessons but none ever performed in public. The first impression: a talented kid at that age would probably be playing the Suzuki "Twinkle Variations".

Wish her success in her upcoming recital.

The article is a bit misleading. Yes - this talented little girl was a first place winner - BUT she was the youngest out of 37 first place winners in Spring 2021 ...so it wasn't like she actually "won" this annual international competition for youth. I know, I'm a killjoy - but I've learned to take everything I read in the media with a grain of salt.

This is an important fact, I was wondering what actually happened, LOL.

I think the newspaper article was more than a bit misleading and not only about her winning first place. Although it's probably true that most three year olds can't play the piano at all, she played the simplest piece imaginable.

My guess is the competition organizers and/or teachers rent Carnegie Recital Hall and invite the performers' relatives. It's possible the little girl will "perform Mozart" but it will probably be some thirty second piece Mozart wrote before the age of ten. Throwing around Mozart's name makes sense to me when journalists called Magnus Carlsen, at a much older age, the Mozart of chess, but is a gimmick for a headline in this case. The idea of entering a child that age in a piano competition does not appeal to me and seems to be more for the benefit of the teachers or parents.

If you read information about the competition, it support’s Plover’s assumption. Someone is doing a lot of press releases related to this little girl.

https://www.elitemusiccompetition.org/

This whole thing reminds me of something that happened while I was teaching high school. I got a mailing asking me to nominate a student to be a High School All American, which required high academic and athletic achievement. I nominated a very worthy student who was accepted by the committee and later got another mailing that said the student or anyone could, for a rather large fee, purchase a volume listing all those who had been accepted. So the main purpose of this High School All American competition was, as far as I can see, to make money for those who organized it.

Agreed. The video is a far cry from what you conjure up when reading that she will play Mozart in Carnegie Hall.

Could someone post to this thread in 20 years and let me know how she's doing?

I’m glad I’m not the only one who had these thoughts, lol. My sense was that the parents decided this child is going to be a prodigy, rather than this child being an actual prodigy. I’m not saying that her playing isn’t impressive in any sense. It just didn’t strike me as prodigious.