Now 24, Mao Fujita won the Clare Haskil piano competition in Switzerland in 2017, and shared second prize in the Tchaikovsky piano competition in Moscow two years later. The Japanese pianist has since made a handful of appearances in the UK, mostly playing the big showy 19th-century repertoire that seems inevitably to be expected of prizewinners, but for his Wigmore debut he has opted for something very different – a survey of Mozart’s piano sonatas presented this week across five recitals.
While cycles of the Beethoven sonatas may be almost commonplace, Mozart’s piano music rarely seems to receive similar concentrated attention. But it’s clearly music that means a great deal to Fujita; he included one of the sonatas in his prize-winning programme in Moscow, and last year released recordings of all of them for Sony Classical. And it was obvious from the very beginning of his first Wigmore programme that he does have something personal and fresh to bring to these works. His first sonata was the C major K279, the earliest to survive, but he had opened his recital with the Variations on Ah vous dirai-je, maman K265, perfectly striking a balance in both between muscular clarity and elegance, the exquisite and the down to earth, while never threatening to become precious or twee.
In K279, and the other C major sonata with which he followed it, K330, everything seemed crisp and purposeful. There was a nice bite to the grace notes, alongside a flowing expressiveness to the left-hand figuration, all in proportion, all within classical bounds. After a first half that remained more or less in the blameless world of C major, the works that followed were all in minor keys, beginning with two late miniature masterpieces, the Adagio in B minor K540, and the A minor Rondo K511. In both some pianists might have squeezed more pathos out of the drooping chromaticisms and irregular phrases than Fujita did, but there was no doubting the unremitting energy that drove his performance of the A minor sonata K331, with its almost Beethovenian angst and throwaway ending. It made one want to hear him play real Beethoven, just as the two Chopin polonaises added as an encore made an all-Chopin programme from him a priority too.
• Further recitals in Mao Fujita’s Mozart sonata series at the Wigmore Hall, Lond, from 11 to 14 July.
