The preludes and fugues of
Bach's
Well-Tempered Clavier, BWV 846-893, set up models that continued to resonate into the 20th century, and rising pianist
Mao Fujita offers an unusually wide selection of preludes here (the fugues haven't been quite so influential). On this double album,
Fujita offers three sets of preludes, in descending order of familiarity. There is
Chopin's set of
24 Preludes, Op. 28,
Scriabin's
24 Preludes, Op. 11, and a set by a Japanese composer,
Akio Yashiro, which apparently is receiving its world premiere, although this is not claimed anywhere. It is this last that is the big news here; these are clever, elegant pieces that hang between
Chopin and Japanese music.
Yashiro later studied in France, but he wrote these works when he was 15, in 1945, having fled to the Japanese countryside at the end of the war. Somehow, the music evokes the mood of
Hayao Miyazaki's
The Wind Rises. His preludes are short pieces that set out some kind of simple baseline, immediately depart from it with whole-tone scales or extended harmonies, and then neatly resolve back to the diatonic key.
Fujita does well with these, catching a kind of humor that is also present in
Chopin. His
Chopin itself, however, is more deadpan, with a monumental, monolithic sound in the bigger pieces and grace and confidence in the quieter ones. His
"Raindrop" Prelude (Op. 28, No. 15 in D flat major) is crystalline, but one can sample to see what one thinks of his relatively dry choices in the likes of the
C minor prelude (Op. 28, No. 20). His performances of the young
Scriabin's set are sensitive to the ways the pieces are clearly modeled on
Chopin but begin to depart from them. Whether or not one would buy this set for
Fujita's performances of the
Chopin and
Scriabin alone will be a matter of taste, but the
Yashiro preludes are a really nice discovery. The sound environment from Berlin's b-sharp studio serves the aims of the project well. ~ James Manheim
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