She is just twenty years old and has already seen more of the world than most people of her age. At the tender age of two her mother taught her to play the piano, and she was hardly four when she started on a course for highly gifted children at the Tokyo School of Music, which she completed as the best in her class. In 1992, when she was nine, she came on a concert tour to Germany and decided to stay in Europe together with her mother. She joined the master classes of Professor Kämmerling at the School of Music in Hannover and soon won numerous prominent piano competitions. Since then, Yu Kosuge has been giving concerts in the main music centres of the world. In her homeland Japan she has already become a star. For weeks on end, her CDs were at the top of the classical music charts. Yu Kosuge, who won the 2004 Deutschlandfunk prize for talented young musicians, belongs to the young generation of Asian pianists who have acquired Western musical culture and are at present conquering European and American concert halls by storm.