Since “Nobu Fever” entered the piano world’s vocabulary after Noboyuki Tsujii’s gold medal at the 2009 Van Cliburn competition (shared with Haochen Zhang), the elephant in the room has been when or if his sightlessness will exit from judgments of his pianistic worth.
For American audiences — like the enthusiastic crowd that greeted Tsujii at The Conrad in La Jolla on Friday — sightless superstardom is unremarkable (see Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Jose Feliciano, etc.). But in the world of classical piano, Tsujii’s achievement is far rarer.
Only a small handful (Maria Theresia von Paradis, Bernard d’Ascoli, organist/harpsichordist Helmut Walcha) have succeeded and none at Tsujii’s sustained heights: the Van Cliburn win, his new Deutsche Grammophon contract, performances with elite orchestras in the U.K., U.S. and Europe, and appearances at venues like Carnegie and Wigmore Halls and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw.
Tsujii’s demanding program Friday night made a tight case for moving beyond “blind wonder” pigeonholes. The packed Baker-Baum auditorium (tickets sold out long ago) was treated to two meaty, technically challenging sonatas (Beethoven’s Waldstein and Chopin’s no. 3 in B minor); a Lisztian virtuoso vehicle (the Mephisto Waltz no. 1); three shorter pieces; and four encores.
Of modest height and rounded physique, Tsujii looks far younger than his 36 years. Escorted by a handler for all stage entries and exits, he, once seated, immediately extends his right hand to the Steinway’s treble end, calibrating himself spatially. Then the transformation begins.
As if mocking his disability, Tsujii plays with an extraordinarily precise touch and sonic definition. In the Waldstein second movement, this injected an otherworldly spaciousness, which nicely amplified the third movement’s joyful release. Tsujii thrillingly staged this rondo’s Janus-faced dance between left-hand drive and right-hand sparkle.
The space and definition Tsujii gives each note infuses a simplicity that the program’s oft-performed music craves. Beyond his enormous rhythmic drive and mastery of dynamic control and contrast, it’s this clarity — both in note-level attack/release and in the pieces’ overall macro architecture — that sets Tsujii apart.
This lucidity also perfectly suited Liszt’s brief but harmonically futuristic “En reve” (Dreaming), which reset the taste buds before Tsujii unleashed Mephisto Waltz No. 1, written by Liszt a quarter century earlier. Tsujii put Liszt’s flamboyant story-telling across with unstrained bravura.
The two 1835 Chopin nocturnes (op. 27, no. 1 and 2) that opened the second half put paid to any lingering doubt that Tsujii prefers virtuosic expression over subtlety. He played these morsels beautifully, communicating both their mysterious blend of instability and calm and much of their emotional weight.
Nine years after composing these nocturnes, Chopin wrote his ambitious and ground-breaking sonata no. 3 in B minor, which Tsujii’s clarity-über-all approach stripped clean of sentimentality. The thunder he brought to the second-movement scherzo made the third-movement largo all the lovelier. His expressive handling of the latter movement’s repeated falling, flowing figures—while avoiding the music’s risk of self-absorption — was the night’s highlight. Tsujii may have danced past Chopin’s ‘Presto, non tanto’ (Very fast, but not too much) marking in the rondo finale, but at its conclusion Baker-Baum erupted in whoops and hollers.
Quibblers might say Tsujii too often chooses splendor or enormity of sound over an actual, personal interpretation, and fans of the warm, ringing tone of a Wilhelm Kempff may be put off. But on top of a stunning virtuosity that makes talk of disability sound absurd, Tsujii’s mature musicality and general good taste are beyond doubt.
Beaming unaffectedly after each of his four encores — the second movement of Beethoven’s Pathetique sonata, Nikolai Kapustin’s Concert Etude No. 1 in C major “Prelude” (op. 40), Stephen Foster’s “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” and Liszt’s ‘La Campanella’ — Tsujii showed he just loves to play. La Jolla returned that emotion all night long.