Gavriil, a 2-year-old boy from Russia, has loved listening to the piano since he was born. When he was just a little over 1 year old, a video of him playing the piano went viral, filling millions with wonder.
The little piano lover lives in St. Petersburg, where his father, Vasily Shcherbenko, 42, works as a software programmer, and his mother, Anastasia Bar, works as a film director and as a professor of creative training at the Higher School of Directors and Scriptwriters of St. Petersburg. Gavriil has two sisters; 20-year-old Ksenia and 18-year-old Pelageya.
Ms. Bar knew very early on that music was significant to her baby boy.
Even as a baby, Gavriil would subtly show his aptitude for sound. He would be “perfectly content” sitting on the laps of his family members as they played the piano. Eventually, he started to touch the keys of the piano himself, and this is when the magic began.
“At some point, sitting on my lap, he began to play chords,“ Ms. Bar told The Epoch Times. ”That is, he began to press with one, two, and three [keys] at once—it was very strange. It was like some kind of breakthrough.”
On Christmas night 2022, when Gavriil was just 1 year and 3 months old, his mom recorded him “playing” the piano for the first time and posted the video on her personal page on social media. But Gavriil enjoyed playing with the big instrument every day, leaving his parents ever so “delighted.”
“We wanted to share it with friends, and therefore we had to create a separate social media page for him,” Ms. Bar said. “But we couldn’t even imagine that this was something unique until people who were amazed after watching the videos started writing to us. Around two weeks later, Gavriil’s page already had millions of views.”
Given how young Gavriil is, his parents have not tried to set up any formal training.
“We don’t have a system, and many of our fans are already criticizing us for it,” the mom said. “We decided not to hire a teacher and not organize classes until our son turns 3 years old. We want to preserve his spontaneous, free play for now.”
As he continues to amaze his online audience around the world, some have observed that Gavriil seems to have an “old soul.” When asked about this, his mother agrees but says it’s beyond comprehension.
“Watching how he communicates with the instruments is an incredible miracle. We always feel a touch of some mystery,” she said.
Outside of piano and music, Gavriil is athletic and loves to run around like other children his age. Yet, there are still differences about him that keep his family wondering.
“We have been thinking about the extent to which the purpose of a child is written somewhere inside, in some kind of divine providence,” Ms. Bar said.
The proud mom says Gavriil was born with “very large hands,” and the doctors told them that their son is “a very strong baby.” She says the hands of other children of the same age are “half the size,” even their palms and fingers are very small in comparison.
“To play the piano, you need to press the keys and do it quite hard. That is, other children simply cannot cope, those who do not have such strong hands. ... in addition to this, there’s this random coincidence that he was born into a family of musicians. [It seems to be] some kind of plan, some kind of God’s plan—I don’t know. He is a tall, strong boy,” Ms. Bar said.
Outside of his viral fame on the internet, Gavriil and his family have been invited to various shows in Russia, but they’ve started to turn down some of these opportunities.
“For us, this is completely unimportant,“ Ms. Bar said. ”We never molded our son into a genius, didn’t chase records, and didn’t try to train him. On the contrary, we want to give him the creative freedom at the piano that he enjoys so much now. He will still have time to study with a teacher.”
Even though others have compared Gavriil to the likes of Mozart, his family encourages him to keep his childhood innocence and joy of music.
“Gavriil only recently began to talk, now our task is to establish free speech,” the mom said, adding that her daughters started talking at 1 year old, but her son only spoke in musical notes for a long time.
“In general, we have such a perception: it is impossible to raise a genius. They can only be born. You just need to live, rejoice, love, do whatever you like. And if there is genius, it will manifest itself. But it is much more important to grow up to be a good and happy person, and this is our first priority as parents.”
His parents do hope, though, that he will one day feel proud of the good that he has spread in the world, even from infancy.
“Gavriil, of course, does not realize his fame now,“ Ms. Bar said. ”We think he will be happy when he realizes how much kindness he brought into the world with his spontaneous piano playing when he was just a baby.
“Especially in such a difficult time for the whole world, where so many things divide people. And by some divine providence, he was able to encourage people from different parts of the planet to love and interact with each other.”
