Jon Nakamatsu
Built for speed, and sometimes more
April 30, 2009Two pianists, both of whom are named Jon Nakamatsu, took turns playing a solo recital on April 28 for the Tuesday Musical Club. The venue was Travis Park United Methodist Church.
One Jon Nakamatsu, a brilliant technician, displayed blazing speed and accuracy but little else. The other Jon Nakamatsu, a thoughtful musician, displayed intelligence, sensitivity and a fine sense of color.
Both have appeared previously and separately in San Antonio. The technical wizard played a solo recital soon after winning the gold medal at the 1997 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, and then a few years later he played the Chopin Concerto in F Minor with the San Antonio Symphony. The thoughtful interpreter made his first local appearance in a deeply satisfying account of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 27 with the symphony in 2005.
Together with that superb Mozart performance, the Jekyll-and-Hyde results in his latest appearance suggest that Nakamatsu’s temperament is more attuned to the classical than to the Romantic outlook.
The zenith came early, in Muzio Clementi’s Sonata in F-sharp Minor, Op. 25, No. 5. Clementi is probably best known for his numerous sonatinas, which nearly every piano student has delved into. But Clementi also made excellent use of larger canvases. If the final presto of this sonata is mainly a technical showpiece, the opening allegro and the middle slow movement are serious, substantial statements. Nakamatsu fully inhabited the piece, especially the first two movements. His dynamics and tempo play were probing and personal, but true to the style, and he took care to underscore Clementi’s bold harmonic modulations, which anticipate Schubert. The death-defying finale seemed to pose no challenges to Nakamatsu.
Robert Schumann’s “Carnaval” and Frédéric Chopin’s Sonata in B Minor were intermittently rewarding. In “Carnaval,” lyrical sections such as the “Valse noble,” “Chiarina,” “Chopin” and “Aveu” were expansively, luxuriously played, but sometimes Nakamatsu pulled back from fully expressing the music’s character. The repeated outbursts in “Pierrot,” for example, wanted greater contrast from their surroundings. Nakamatsu took the brilliant sections lickety-split, faster and more cleanly than just about anyone on the circuit, but he didn’t give them much shape or rhythmic bite.
In the Chopin sonata, Nakamatsu’s playing was sometimes commanding, sometimes pale and disengaged, as though shrinking from the more extreme passions of the Romantic spirit. He left much the same impression with Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu, played as an encore.
Between Schumann and Chopin, Nakamatsu offered five of the “Danses Fantastiques” by Loris Tjeknavorian. Thesee attractive but slight pieces are in the Modern mainstream, with some modal harmonies and melodic contours that reflect the composer’s Armenian and Iranian roots.
Mike
Greenberg
