Pianist Fujita proves an introspective yet compelling presence in Carnegie recital
Is there a Japanese way to play Mozart, Liszt and Beethoven?
The idea goes against some well-established principles. One is that we expect performers to be individuals, bringing their personal perspectives to the music. Another is that music is the “universal language,” an art without borders.
And yet the recital by pianist Mao Fujita in Carnegie Hall Sunday afternoon left one wondering whether the culture that brought us haiku, the tea ceremony, and the music of Tōru Takemitsu has something unique to tell us about the European canon.
Now 25, Fujita began earning medals and audience awards in the leading European piano competitions while still in his teens, culminating with a silver medal at the Tchaikovsky International Competition in Moscow in 2019. Sunday’s recital left no doubt that this pianist’s distinctive sense of time and sound sets him apart.
Do the examples cited above indicate a microscopic attention to the smallest detail of expression? Well, yes and no.
Yes, Fujita’s happy place on Sunday was a pianissimo realm of pearly tone, to which he returned at every opportunity, contemplating the melody or melodies that emerged from the mist. You might be surprised at how many such moments there can be even among the hellish visions of Liszt’s Après une lecture du Dante: fantasia quasi sonata or the raging storm of Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata in F minor, Op. 57.
But no, Fujita was no micromanager of moments. The other distinctive feature of his playing is best described as flow. The performance, in its small details and larger scope, seemed controlled by natural forces. Piano technique disappeared, and all those dots and lines on the page seemed caught by a gust of wind, or swept down a mountain stream. The tenderest melody or the most extravagant explosion of octaves were all part of the picture—the unity of nature, if you like.
Of course Japanese culture doesn’t have a monopoly on that concept, but it is certainly a leader in the field, so to speak. Furthermore, Fujita’s calling card tor this recital was selections from the Twenty-Four Preludes by a mid-20th-century Japanese composer, Akio Yashiro.
Years of study in Paris made Yashiro an astute observer of all that era’s crosscurrents of European music, which (according to Oren Vinogradov’s helpful program notes) he explored and parodied in these brief pieces, modeled on similar sets by Chopin and Scriabin and composed in the watershed year of 1945.
For his part, Fujita established the tone of the evening by focusing not on a music-history survey but on the delicate joinery of each tiny piece, leaning into the keys only when the expression marking pesante (heavy) gave him no choice. The first prelude was a whirl of figurations so fluid as to seem not made of individual notes—a foretaste of many such moments to come. Afterwards came glimpses of an elfin dance, a Chopinesque dialogue, a stroll in the woods, a jazzy cakewalk, a lonely melody amid wispy arpeggios, a whirring machine and more—all of it more suggested than stated, and inflected as naturally as breathing.
Even the thick textures of Scriabin’s rhapsodic Fantasy in B minor, Op. 28, felt somehow light and easy as the music swelled quickly to a robust forte of throbbing chords and rushing bass octaves. Despite Fujita’s ever-flexing tempos, the music never lost its forward drive. Individual voices emerged to speak and sing amid the tumult.
Fujita turned to passions of a more poetic sort in Liszt’s “Sonnetto del Petrarca No. 104,” the first of the program’s two pieces from the Italian section of Années de pèlerinage. The opening pages of this musical response to a Petrarch sonnet found the pianist in his pearly mode as a musing melody glowed in the piano’s upper and middle registers, and even the subsequent virtuoso eruptions felt like natural responses to the poet’s ardor.
Fujita’s mastery of the notorious technical demands of Liszt’s “Dante Sonata” was impressive but not the point in this performance, which viewed the sufferings of the damned from a height in an unfolding panorama. Oceanic waves of octaves led to a single desolate melody as the music surged and ebbed; there was a certain equanimity to the momentary vision of heaven, stars glittering in a cold sky, and even to the piece’s climax of climaxes, a titanic explosion of double octaves.
What followed intermission was in effect a new program, of Classical mien, featuring sets of variations. This genre can seem like an intellectual exercise, hanging assorted musical ideas on a single harmonic framework, but in Fujita’s hands it became a flight of fancy, delicate and airy in Mozart’s “Ah vous dirai-je maman” Variations, K. 265, and rugged in Beethoven’s Thirty-Two Variations on an Original Theme in C minor, WoO 80.
The pianist’s feet seemed hardly to touch the ground as Mozart’s variations on a nursery tune spun out in fleet scales and witty asides. In contrast, Beethoven’s eight-bar theme in the manner of a Baroque passacaglia generated a flurry of emotions from tenderness to rage, but even here there seemed a tongue-in-cheek quality to it all on the part of composer and pianist alike.
The variations movement of the “Appassionata” is the calm at the center of a stormy sonata, and never more so than in Fujita’s hushed performance, although something—excess energy from the first movement, maybe?—caused him to play the chorale-like theme uncharacteristically out of time.
During the sonata’s first movement, for all its sudden twists and furious outbursts, one felt a steady hand at the controls, and even the torrential finale had an evenness to it—raising the question, can a performance have too much flow? Should there be more rocks in that stream? However, the movement’s dotted theme was a crisp summons, and the pianist’s total commitment to the frantic coda swept all before it.
Fujita responded to the roaring, standing applause with two very short encores—Scriabin’s languid Prelude in B flat, Op. 11, no. 21, and Mendelssohn’s dancing Song Without Words in F-sharp Minor, Op. 67, no.2–and a somewhat longer one, Glazunov’s wave-like Etude in E minor, Op. 31, no. 2.
Carnegie Hall presents pianist Mitsuko Uchida with Musicians from Marlboro in chamber music by Kurtág, Beethoven and Robert Schumann, 7:30 p.m. Tuesday in Carnegie’s Zankel Hall. carnegiehall.org
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