Around the Music Festival

The Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival in Germany held a concert on July 18, 2025, at the Music Conference Hall in Lübeck to honor the winner of the 2025 Leonard Bernstein Prize.

This year’s winner was pianist Hayato Sumino, who performed Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Festival Orchestra conducted by Holly Choi. For the encore, he played “Mambo” from Bernstein’s “West Side Story”, receiving enthusiastic applause.

The award was established in 2002 and is sponsored by the German Savings Banks Financial Group (Sparkassen Finanzgruppe). The prize money is 10,000 euros (approximately 11,600 dollars). Previous recipients include Lang Lang, Alisa Weilerstein, and Emily D’Angelo.

Sumino is a 30-year-old. He stadyed in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Tokyo, while at university, he studied abroad at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in France, where he conducted research on music information processing.

He completed a master’s degree at the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo. He is also active under the stage name “Cateen” on YouTube, where he has over 1.4 million subscribers.

PHOTO：Agentur 54° John Garve　/　Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival


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