In New York debut, pianist Yukine Kuroki displays an uncommon touch
One wouldn’t say Yukine Kuroki, who gave her New York debut recital Tuesday in Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall as first-prize winner of the 2022 Dublin International Piano Competition, was an individual colorist at her instrument.
She was something perhaps even more rare: a world-class touchist.
If that word doesn’t exist, it should—to describe the myriad ways she addressed the keys to produce bold (yet never banged) fortissimos and feathery leggierissimos, a roar of octaves that suddenly dissolved into a shower of pearls, and layered textures that gave every voice its own role in the drama.
More important, these sensory gifts—along with the dazzling digital prowess one has come to expect from competition winners—were placed at the service of an active musical imagination that made every bar of the works on her program come alive. Even familiar pieces such as Debussy’s L’Isle Joyeuse managed to sound improvised on the spot.
True, her concise program—mostly extroverted Romantic-to-Impressionist pieces, with some jazzy variations by Nikolai Kapustin for dessert—was rather narrowly tailored to her strengths. But this was a New York debut, not a conservatory jury, and if Liszt, Rachmaninoff and Minako Tokoyama were her calling cards, and she played them so alluringly, who could complain?
For all her sonic versatility, Kuroki seemed to have a tonal “home base” of soft, barely-pedaled timbres where she liked to linger when possible, sometimes lending her interpretations an elusive, enigmatic quality. Her jabs of musical wit and humor stood out the more for that.
Her performance of Schumann’s song “Widmung” in Liszt’s transcription began in a ripply dream, and the song’s original leaping accompaniment was merely suggested, pianissimo, above the melody. But composer and pianist went full grandioso before the tender coda.
Kuroki kept the Liszt transcription of Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre light and sardonic for as long as possible, even in the flashing octave passages and a gnarly fugue, until a still larger storm of octaves rose up and inundated all.
The swirling trill that opens L’Isle joyeuse was less a summons to revelry than a fairy apparition, signaling a conception of the piece that was unusually light and airy, from the initial dainty dance to a lyrical theme that emerged molto rubato, as if recalled in a dream. Even the piece’s coruscating climax seemed not so much erotically charged as nervously excitable.
According to John Kissane’s vivid program notes, Guido Agosti’s arrangement of three movements from Stravinsky’s The Firebird was so complex it had to be notated on three staves—a test of the pianist’s voicing skills that Kuroki passed brilliantly, especially in the gauzy, many-layered “Lullaby.” Before that, octaves and ripping glissandos blazed in the furious “Infernal Dance.” The suite closed with the peaceful-to-triumphant “Finale,” its Russian theme emerging from the mist into bright sunshine and as much orchestral grandeur as fingers, arms, shoulders and upper body could muster.
Debussy, both fantastical and jazzy, was the godfather of Tokoyama’s Musica Nara, composed in 2006 as a test piece for a piano competition in Japan. A vision of Nara, Japan’s ancient capital, arose as a pentatonic melody surrounded by wisps of decoration and watery ripples. Kuroki’s protean touch flicked between episodes sketching “the Guardian Deities of the Children, the busy Running Priest, the Laughing Buddha, the comical demon Obstinacy, and the brave Deva King” before all vanished in a haze of trills.
Kuroki’s rendering of Rachmaninoff’s transcription of his own song “Lilacs” was especially painterly in its impressionism, as the delicate melody appeared and receded in various registers amid liquid figurations.
On the other hand, that composer’s Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 36, was the most substantial work on the program, a test not only of this pianist’s technical chops and stamina but of her ability to manage larger forms.
The improvisational character of her playing, which enlivened other pieces on the program, was less helpful here, as the agitato rush of the opening pages threatened to spill over from the rhapsodic to the chaotic. As intriguing as the ensuing moments were, one couldn’t help wishing for more sense of the bones of the piece.
The slow movement, on the other hand, was a delicious interlude, as the pianist luxuriated in the inner voices and spun out an ecstatic duet that climaxed in a shower of scales. The exuberant finale raced and boomed with abandon, and the Rachmaninoffian “big tune” fairly glowed with passionate rubato. One could imagine a more high-momentum, strict-tempo finale, but Kuroki’s liberties were not unwelcome here. And she wisely barreled through the coda to the end, so its flourishes sounded not kitschy but thrilling.
Who knew the opening bars of The Rite of Spring, when fitted with a walking bass, could become a loose-limbed jazz ballad? Strokes of wit like this abounded in Kapustin’s Variations, Op. 41, as Stravinsky’s archaic bassoon melody found itself enmeshed in the piano stylings of Oscar Peterson and Art Tatum. Kuroki reveled in the stabbing chords and swirling figurations, leggiero one moment and pounding the next, and closing with an impossibly fast, syncopated toccata.
Her brief encore was literally “more” of the same, Kapustin’s Concert Etude Op. 40, no. 1 (“Prelude”), another riot of fast scales and syncopations.
Fashion reporting now being part of the music beat, one noted a touch of musical wit in the pianist’s attire: for the program’s first half, a simple green satin gown, off the left shoulder; for the second, the same gown “inverted,” i.e. off the right shoulder, in red.