October 30 2024 at the following concert review was accessed at
https://www.smh.com.au/culture/live-reviews/out-of-this-world-orchestra-delivers-a-masterful-jupiter-20241030-p5kmo4.html
Also viewable at https://www.msn.com/en-au/entertainment/music/out-of-this-world-orchestra-delivers-a-masterful-jupiter/ar-AA1taXxO
Sydney Morning Herald
Nobuyuki Tsujii in Recital Opera House Concert Hall
October 29
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM★★★★½
Nobuyuki Tsujii (Nobu) sits low at the piano, with loose, but by no means flailing, arms and flexible wrists that create a full sound of ringing clarity, carefully graded to musical purpose and the composer’s precise markings.
There is no mannerism, either musical or gestural, and his rhythmic focus is insistent, deviating from the pulse only where the music or stylistic common sense demands it. This sometimes gives his playing a literal quality, playing just what was written without interpolation or distortion. Far from being a limitation or lack of personality, this gives his interpretation a degree of purity, untarnished by personal caprice, which is itself distinctive.
Being blind, he is distracted neither by the audience nor the keyboard’s terrain, measuring the keys out and dusting them with a handkerchief before he starts and then relying purely on sound, tactile contact and memory to shape the musical path.
He began Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in D minor, Opus 31 No.2, The Tempest, with hushed softness, and these passages (including the ghostly recitatives when they return) turned out to be some of the most reflective moments of the concert until he played Debussy’s Clair de lune (beautifully) as an encore.
When he began the agitated Allegro, the attack was tightly driven, and when the music finally lands on the tonic chord, the stormy theme rolled out from the piano in great torrents of sound. The slow movement was quiet though slightly less poetic, and the finale swept through, deftly and swiftly.
In the Gondolier’s Song, which begins Liszt’s three-piece set, Venice and Naples, from the second volume of the Years of Pilgrimage, he revealed the simplicity of well-shaped melody, surrounded by glimmering watery adornment.
The second piece (Canzone) was stark and portentous and the Tarantella was manically agile and brilliantly virtuosic. Again the central melody unfolded with undistorted, carefully shaped beauty.
Nobu began the second half with a bracket of pieces by Ravel, bringing well-defined clarity to the Minuet on the name of Haydn and perfectly balanced control to the haunting melancholy of Pavane for a Dead Princess. Jeux d’eau (Fountains) cascaded and rippled with immaculately defined arabesques and sprays.
Nobu made the Eight Concert Etudes Opus 40 by Nikolai Kapustin into studies of open-spirited vitality, mixing the pianistic style of Rachmaninov with the harmonies and rhythmic contours of jazz.
The more vigorous numbers were particularly successful. Reverie is not a particularly dreamy piece, but Raillery is argumentative and truculent, and Nobu’s fluid command of the keyboard in the Toccatina and Finale were a wonder to behold.
I left at the fourth encore (which had included a quietly tender rendition of Waltzing Matilda) though the capacity crowd in the Opera House Concert Hall may well have kept him there all night.
*****