As the 2009 Music Teachers’ Association of California convention began to wind down its five days of intense musical activities, pianist Jon Nakamatsu presented a recital on Monday evening that was particularly appropriate to the occasion.
Speaking to the audience Nakamatsu, Gold Medal winner of the 1997 International Van Cliburn Piano Competition, reminded the audience of teachers and students that he himself is a product of MTAC and had appeared as a young student performing in various recitals and master classes in several annual conventions. He admitted that the sight of concert grand Steinways on stage in hotel ballrooms (not his usual performance venue) brought back to him memories of the nervous anticipation he felt while performing during conventions. We also learned that this was his last concert appearance as a bachelor, since he was getting married the following week – his bride, we learned, was not a musician thus he assured us there were not going to be any career conflicts.
The concert began with an unusual repertoire choice, the Clementi Sonata in F-sharp Minor, a rarely heard work that ranged far beyond the student Sonatinas so familiar to students. Nakamatsu’s performance was crisply articulated in its outer movements and nicely expressive in its lovely central movement, Lento é patetico.
The following two works, Schumann’s Papillons and Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata were much more familiar to the audience and received solid and attractive performances. It was interesting to observe on the jumbo monitor screens on each side of the stage that Nakamatsu’s brilliant technique most often featured quick attack and release touches that produced mostly non legato passages in faster sections.
In the second half of the recital, we heard an entirely different Jon Nakamatsu – not so much in the very attractive and brilliantly performed “Five Dances from Danses Fantastiques, Op. 2 by Loris Tjeknavorian  - but in his extraordinary performance of three selections by Liszt: the Impromptu for Princess Gortschakoff, the Valse Impromptu in A-flat Major and the concluding work on the program the “Dante Sonata .” In these works suddenly we were hearing beautiful intense legato and cantabile playing with elegant coloring and shaping of phrases. Not that there weren’t plenty of fireworks, for in the “Dante Sonata” he blew us away with his steely control and boldly imaginative dynamics.
In response to a rousing standing ovation, Nakamatsu responded with two encores: Mendelssohn’s “Andante and Rondo Capriccioso” and Chopin’s Fantasie-Impromptu. These were dazzling! As the audience departed, you could hear the sounds of a happy audience that was truly stimulated by Nakamatsu’s performance.
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