Thursday January 19th, 2023 – This evening, we welcomed the Japanese pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii back to Carnegie Hall. In 2018, I attended Nobu’s Carnegie debut with ORPHEUS: an exciting evening. In 2019, the pianist gave a solo recital in the famed venue, which I was sadly unable to attend.
Tonight’s concert began with a transcendent musical experience. Nobu, who is blind, was led to the Steinway where he seated himself and took the measure of the keyboard; he then commenced to play Beethoven’s immortal Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp Minor, Op. 27, No. 2, “Moonlight”. From the very first note, Nobu drew us deeply into the music. Playing in a whispered – but also miraculously weighted – pianissimo, he suffused the beloved melody with a spiritual resonance that is beyond rare. Sustaining this atmosphere throughout, Nobu held us under an enchantment. There was a palpable silence in the hallowed hall such as I have seldom – if ever – experienced in my six decades of concert-going.
As the final note of the Adagio sostenuto lingered on the air, my impulse was to get up and leave, taking this perfect memory with me. But, of course, I didn’t: I stayed on, listening to Nobu’s remarkable playing of the rest of the Moonlight and joining in the eager applause that followed.
Next came Franz Liszt’s Consolation No. 2 in E-Major; composed between 1844 and 1850 the Consolations are a set of six short pieces. The second of these has a gentle, shimmering start before turning pensive. Here, Nobu showed his gift for delicacy, and – later – for free-flowing lyricism.
The pianist then offered a sort of ‘Liszt encore’: Venezia e Napoli. The opening movement, Gondoliers, is evocative of a summer afternoon on the canals of Venice: mysterious at first, the music conjures up the water rippling in the sunlight. A song, such as the gondolier might sing, springs up: fanciful fiorature and tingling trills are dazzlingly set forth by the pianist. The ensuing Canzone has a lively start, but soon goes deep and dramatic; the canzone‘s finale is fantastically animated – “thousands of notes!”, I scrawled on my playbill – and was delivered by Nobu with pinpoint accuracy and unfettered joy. The pianist then further demonstrated his phenomenal dexterity in the concluding Tarantella.
For the second half of the program, Nobu turned first to Ravel: three relatively brief works were offered, starting with Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn. While gentle and charming, one could sense a haunted feeling lurking under the surface, which Nobu captured in his appealing interpretation. He then employed his vast dynamic range to sterling effect in the familiar Pavane pour une infante défunte, giving the music a touching beauty of expression. The luminous Jeux d’eau – one of the composer’s gems – is full of high, silvery undulations which seemed magical in Nobu’s hands.
The concert’s final work, Eight Concert Etudes by the Soviet composer Nikolai Kapustin, have an improvisational feeling, mixing classicism with elements of jazz. Composed in 1984, they are technically extremely demanding, filled as they are with torrents of notes played a supersonic speeds. Nobu dazzled us with the clarity and sureness of his technique. If the music itself began to wear a bit thin after a while, the pianist’s playing was simply remarkable. The audience was soon sighing aloud with disbelief or admiration as Nobu seemed to leap over one technical hurdle after another as he dashed to the finish line. This resulted in a boisterous standing ovation from the sold out house, and hundreds of cellphones were raised aloft to capture the excitement.
For Nobu’s first encore, J. S. Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring“, in an arrangement by Dame Myra Hess, he returned to the purity and depth of feeling with which the concert had started. Although we knew more encores would follow, I took my leave whilst the audience was cheering. I’ll never forget this evening, with Nobu mesmerizing us in the Moonlight.
~ Oberon
Oberon's Glade 
