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This 12-year-old cellist writes and plays his own compositions and they are phenomenal

25 September 2017, 14:28 | Updated: 2 October 2017, 13:44

Prepare to feel totally inadequate - this 12-year-old is seriously talented.

Thomas Precal is a 12-year-old cellist from Utrecht in the Netherlands. A talented performer, he told Classic FM how he started composing:

“This first etude actually came out of an exercise that my teacher gave me. The exercise was to play arpeggios on open strings. I wouldn’t be me if I wasn’t going to improvise on that. So after a couple days, I had a theme, and out of that, I could go on.”

As you can hear from the video above, it sounds like quite a complex piece for such a young performer to play, let alone compose. However, this wasn't an issue for Thomas:

“Well, there was not an actual hardest part to play, except for the last four bars at the end. What was difficult was that you had to tune all the chords every day and there were a couple annoying chords with fifths.”

“The second etude is for double stops and octaves. It is difficult to say which one is more difficult because they are both very different from each other. In the third etude (which I currently am working on) is going to be an etude for the thumb position.”

As well as working on his second and third etudes already, his performance of another one of his own compositions titled Little Fantasy earned him first place in his category (ages 12-14) the final of the International Heran Competition 2017 in Ústí nad Orlicí in the Czech Republic as well as the Overall-Winner prize (Laureate).