Mao Fujita certainly likes big projects. His debut recording for Sony Classical was a complete survey of Mozart’s piano sonatas; his follow-up brings together three sets of preludes in all 24 of the major and minor keys, each separated historically from the previous one by approximately half a century. Chopin’s 1839 set provides the model for both Scriabin’s Op 11, completed in 1896, and the preludes by Akio Yashiro, which he composed in 1945, at the age of 15, and which Fujita has recorded for the first time.
The Tokyo-born Yashiro studied in Paris with Messiaen and Nadia Boulanger in the early 1950s, but these earlier preludes are firmly rooted in the 19th century, with just occasional hints that he might have heard something of Debussy and Ravel. Fujita plays them straightforwardly, never attempting to gloss over their touches of naivety, and his approach to the Chopin and Scriabin sets is equally without frills. There’s a crystal-clarity to his playing and a careful concern for every detail of the piano writing that serve the Scriabin miniatures very well, but Chopin’s preludes really need much more character than he provides.
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