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The following review appeared in the Chicago Tribune in 2010
Gold-medal pianist wows 'em at Ravinia opener
Gold-medal pianist wows 'em at Ravinia opener
Classical review
Classical review
June 04, 2010|By John von Rhein | Classical music critic
With the Chicago Symphony busy with Beethoven downtown, Ravinia is relying almost entirely on piano recitals as place holders this month before the orchestra sets up shop for the summer at our Highland Park pleasure dome. One such artist, the young Japanese pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii, played the opening concert of the 2010 festival season in his area debut Thursday night at Ravinia's Martin Theatre.
There were many impressive aspects to his performance, mixed with a few lapses of musical judgment that will need to be addressed as the 22-year-old gold-medal winner (actually he shared first prize with a Chinese pianist, Haochen Zhang) of the 2009 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition settles into his career.
No doubt the Cliburn jury found Tsujii's back story as compelling as the audience in Fort Worth reportedly did. Blind since birth, the baby-faced pianist learns everything by ear, without resorting to the cumbersome Braille method. How he can commit so many notes to memory and deliver them with such fearless technical assurance, accuracy and musicality is simply astonishing.
Clearly he is blessed with extraordinary dedication to making music, and that, along with his nearly infallible fingers, shone brightly in the Liszt, Chopin and Schumann works on the first half of his program.
Liszt's "Un sospiro" ("A Sigh") and "Rigoletto" Concert Paraphrase roared and sang in the grand Romantic manner. The nonchalance with which Tsujii negotiated the etude's fiendish hand-crossings took your breath away, as did the ardent sweep he brought to the opera transcription.
I also admired the rounded tone, suppleness of line and lyrical grace he brought to Chopin's D-flat major Nocturne (Opus 27), although the darker, more enigmatic C-sharp minor Nocturne felt unfocused. Schumann's "Papillons" was similarly uneven. The delicate, fluttering caprice and warm colorations were undeniably ravishing but I wondered why he treated the waltz to such clipped, foursquare phrasing.
Tsujii ended with that knuckle-busting gift to all virtuoso pianists, Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition," which just so happens to be Ravinia's "One Score, One Chicago" selection for this year. This grand tour of the Victor Hartman portrait gallery enlisted every weapon in his considerable arsenal. And much of his playing was as good as it was amazing – his light-fingered depiction of children at play in the Tuileries gardens, the menacing, sonorous sweep of "Baba-Yaga."
Alas, his breakneck speeds for both "The Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks" and "The Market Place at Limoges" reduced these pieces to a hash. Yes, he got all the notes in, but where was the charm, the atmosphere? There were no encores.
I'd like to check back with Tsujii once the three years of his Cliburn management are over to gauge his musical progress. His achievement is awesome, his potential extraordinarily high. But he needs time to grow, and I hope his handlers give him plenty of room in which to do just that.
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