Mozart: The Complete Piano Sonatas / Mao Fujita

Mao Fujita’s Mozart cycle is a model of poise, control, and style, and certainly holds its own alongside our reference versions.

Mao Fujita's Carnegie Hall recital debut occurred on January 25, 2023.

Mao Fujita, one of the most sought after pianists of his generation, debuts with a major recording project – the eagerly anticipated studio recording of Mozart’s complete Piano Sonatas, presented across 5 CDs. With an innate musical sensitivity and naturalness to his artistry, Mao Fujita has already impressed many leading musicians as one of those special talents which comes along only rarely.

An extraordinary performer who has the ability to instantly captivate any audience with his incredible musicianship, in 2017 he won First Prize at the prestigious Concours International de Piano Clara Haskil in Switzerland, along with the Audience Award, Prix Modern Times and the Prix Coup de Coeur, and in 2019 he became the Silver Medallist at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. This album, presented in a 5-CD special clamshell box, with soft-touch lamination, is a stunning debut from Mao Fujita – undoubtedly one of the world’s most extraordinarily gifted young pianists.

“A musician of tremendous versatility and taste, with a poetic sense of pulse...” – The Times

REVIEWS:

In 2021 the 22-year-old pianist Mao Fujita made his Verbier Festival debut with a series of five recitals devoted to Mozart’s complete piano sonatas that I reviewed for another publication. Such an ambitious project can be risky and nerve-wracking if one expects to achieve world-class results. After all, the purity and transparency of Mozart’s keyboard writing allows for no blemishes, no unevenness, no misplaced accents, and basically no place to hide. However, Fujita’s fearless demeanor, unflappable mastery, feeling for nuance, and sheer joy in music making consistently impressed me. These qualities happily extend to his Mozart cycle studio recordings.

The performances abound with felicities. Let’s start with the C major K. 279’s third-movement Allegro, where subtle shifts in color and dynamics inform Fujita’s crisply delineated right-hand passagework. Then we move on to the B-flat K. 281 opening Allegro’s ear-tickling yet dead of center ornaments. The D major “Dürnitz” sonata K. 284’s lengthy third-movement Theme and Variations are subject to a wide berth of tempo changes that still manage to sound inevitably unified. Fujita projects the A minor K. 310’s drama through dynamic unanimity in both hands; as a result, the first movement’s left-hand chords provide a strong underpinning rather than a faceless backdrop.

The scrupulous voice leading and controlled reserve of Fujita’s C minor K. 457 sonata finale compensates for a relatively lightweight first movement (the pianist does not include the C minor Fantasy K. 475 that usually precedes the sonata). One might expect a headlong and flashy dispatch of the F major K. 332’s virtuosic finale from this young firebrand, yet Fujita’s comfortable tempo gets more out of the music’s rich melodic core.

In concert I found Fujita’s F major K. 533/494 sonata first movement to be dry and matter-of-fact and the Rondo finale slightly precious–but emphatically not here. On the other hand, the C major K. 330, B –flat K. 333, and D major K. 576 outer movements are held back and somewhat small-scaled, especially when measured against Lili Kraus’ swift angularity, Roberto Prosseda’s more palpable tension and release, or Robert Levin’s improvisational aesthetic. Qualms aside, Fujita’s Mozart cycle is a model of poise, control, and style, and certainly holds its own alongside our reference versions.

-- ClassicsToday.com (Jed Distler)

The first thing that strikes is his affection for this music, which shines out of every bar: the care with which he approaches every sonata, whether mature or early, is consistently impressive. Fujita’s sound world is very much at one with Mozart’s – with a translucence of tone that brings the music sparklingly to life.

-- Gramophone