Hayato Sumino Japanese Singer With 1.4M YouTube Subscribers

Early life

Hayato Sumino was born on 14 July 1995 and is a Japanese pianist, composer and online video creator. He began playing the piano at the age of three.

His schooling took place at Kaisei Junior & Senior High School, and he went on to the University of Tokyo, where he studied science and engineering at the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology. He completed a master's degree in March 2020 and received the President's Award on graduating. Alongside his degree he spent six months at the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music in France, studying music information processing and artificial intelligence. The combination of technical training and performance is a recurring feature of how he is described.

Career

Sumino first drew notice in competitions in Japan and abroad. In August 2018 he won the Grand Prix at the 42nd PTNA Piano Competition, and in July 2019 he took third prize at the Lyon International Piano Competition. That year he also released the album Passion on Warner Music. A second album, HAYATOSM, followed in 2020 on eplus music.

Since 2019 he has also played piano in Penthouse, a Japanese band that works in a style often called city soul. Separately, he runs a YouTube channel under the name Cateen, which had more than 1.5 million subscribers by 12 January 2025.

In 2021 he entered the XVIII International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw. Restrictions linked to the COVID-19 pandemic meant that he prepared largely through online lessons with the pianist Jean-Marc Luisada. He advanced to the third round, the semifinal. His second-round performance was streamed live and drew 45,000 online viewers, a record for the competition. Chopin's music has remained central to his reputation as a performer.

His later recordings were released on Sony Classical: Human Universe in 2024 and Chopin Orbit in 2026. In October 2025 he performed at the 28th Beijing Music Festival. He is a Steinway Artist.

Composition runs alongside performance in his output. In 2020 he completed Big Cat Waltz, Tinkerland and a Piano Sonata No. 0 titled "SOUMEI", along with a cadenza for Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. Other pieces from the same year are playful studies on familiar material: seven levels of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star", and Happy Birthday To Everyone, a set of variations in all twelve major keys. One Minute Hourglass appeared in 2021, New Birth in 2022 and Baby's Breath in 2023.

His 2024 works include Turkish March Variations in All 24 Keys, the piece Human Universe, and a set of three Nocturnes subtitled "Pre Rain", "After Dawn" and "Once in a Blue Moon". A later work, Forma, is dated 2026. He also composed the soundtrack to Firstline, a 2024 short film directed by China Sui that was released by Toho Animation Studio as part of its Gemnibus volume 1 anthology.

Recognition

The principal results in his career so far are the Grand Prix at the 42nd PTNA Piano Competition in 2018, third prize at the Lyon International Piano Competition in 2019, and his progress to the semifinal stage of the Chopin Competition in 2021. His University of Tokyo master's degree was accompanied by the President's Award.