5-Year-Old Italian Piano Prodigy Wows Crowd With Amazing Mozart Rendition

(Italy) Enjoy 5-year-old Alberto Cartuccia Cingolani performing some Mozart.🎶🎵

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— GoodNewsCorrespondent (@GoodNewsCorres1) May 22, 2022

The classical music composer Mozart is one of the most well-known child prodigies, who famously began writing compositions when he was about 5 years old. So it's fitting that a fellow young star is bringing his music to life. Five-year-old Italian piano prodigy Alberto Cartuccia Cingolani stunned audiences at the 10th International Musical Competition in Penne, in the Abruzzo region, with a masterful rendition of Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 16 in C major. The video of the performer quickly went viral online, garnering over 5 million views on Twitter.

Based in the Marche region in central Italy, Cingolani comes from a musical family. His father works as a teacher in the Lombardy region and his mother is a singing instructor. When their son was 3 years old, they introduced him to the piano, and quickly spotted his natural affinity for the instrument. They began with practice sessions lasting 10 minutes and gradually increased as Cingolani matured. Even though he couldn't read music when he started—and is in fact still learning—he has what they call absolute pitch, which is the ability to identify and recreate any musical note.

“He started playing during the months of the first lockdown,” Alberto's mother, Alessia Cingolani, says. “I was always at home, so we started playing with a small keyboard, in order to do something stimulating. From there I realized that Alberto was well suited. [Doing this, my] husband and I noticed that he had perfect pitch. For a year and a half now, [Alberto] has been doing remarkable things, both for his age and for the time it took him to learn. Even though he still doesn't know how to read [music] notes well, indeed almost not at all, he takes his position on the keyboard and repeats the pieces. He is very instinctive.” The family has been escorting the future star to numerous music competitions in Italy, and recording some of his best performances.

If you want to see more piano performances by Cingolani, you can head over to his father Simone Cingolani's YouTube channel.