Simply Marvelous
David A. Kemp | Plano, TX USA | 08/29/2003
(5 out of 5 stars)
"A wonderful recording. Nojima may well be the finest pianist most people have never heard of. Minoru Nojima was a child prodigy in Japan, won a major nationwide competition there as a teenager, studied with Lev Oborin in Moscow and then with Constance Keene and Abram Chasins in New York, and burst upon the international music scene as a winner of the Van Cliburn piano competition in 1969. Although known and highly respected amongst pianists as a "pianist's pianist," he is not well known to most music lovers, largely because he doesn't like to make recordings and has made extremely few. His first recital available in the USA was his 1986 CD Nojima Plays Liszt for the San-Francisco-based audiophile label Reference Recordings. It was enthusiastically received and won rave reviews in several publications. This Ravel CD is the successor to that one. Like the Liszt recital, this technically superb, rich-sounding digital recording was made (in 1989) by Keith Johnson in the Civic Auditorium of Oxnard, California; Nojima plays the same tonally beautiful Hamburg Steinway concert grand. The piano sound here is state-of-the-art, very much like (and perhaps even a tad better than) the stunning sound of the Liszt recital. Nojima thrives on and indeed seems to seek out music that bristles with formidable technical difficulties and challenges. These he surmounts without breaking a sweat; he almost makes such music sound easy. The pieces here are in their way no less demanding than those in his heroic Liszt recital. Nojima plays Miroirs (1905), five pieces, and Gaspard de la nuit (1908), three slightly longer pieces. Miroirs is certainly taxing enough, but Gaspard de la nuit is even more intimidating. As annotator Harris Goldsmith writes: "Ravel by his own admission sought [in Gaspard de la nuit] to produce a piano work that exceeded Balakirev's Islamey in difficulty. Each of the pieces abounds with knuckle-breaking demands, and each confronts the pianist with a particular, unique problem." The final and longest piece, Scarbo, has been described elsewhere as "a fearsome study in the Lisztian transcendental mold." Nojima is a consummate virtuoso, and his huge, effortless technique embraces with ease all the demands of Ravel's music. His playing here is distinguished not only for its precision, brilliance, and tonal splendor, but also for its poetry, its elegance, its delicacy. (Note for audiophiles: I compared this performance of Gaspard de la nuit with Vladimir Ashkenazy's on Decca/London, also a digital recording. Ashkenazy, who is of course a world-famous, much-recorded virtuoso, is one of my favorite pianists, and of the major classical labels, Decca/London has long been my favorite for sound quality. But in this comparison, not only does Nojima provide by far the more impressive performance, but the Decca/London recording is not even close in engineering quality. Which prompts this reasonable audiophile question: if Keith Johnson, working for the small audiophile label Reference Recordings, can capture the immediacy, brilliance, depth, and richness of piano tone that we hear here, why can't the major classical labels, with all their resources, engineer recordings of comparable excellence?)A note on the length of this CD (which the notes give as 50:30, but which my CD player gives as 49:21), since one reviewer has complained on this score. Reference Recordings provides the following statement in the notes: "This program is somewhat short by compact disc standards. We at Reference Recordings wished to include more music by Ravel, but Mr. Nojima felt strongly that these are the pieces with which he is ready to make recorded statements." Given Nojima's known reluctance to record, I see no reason to doubt the truthfulness of this statement. It would be a shame if the length of this CD discourages anyone otherwise interested from acquiring it. It deserves to be heard and treasured by anyone who loves Ravel's piano music, and/or by anyone who admires breathtaking pianism."
Track Listings (8) - Disc #1