A review of the concert on May 2, 2009 by Richard Scheinen.
There are many levels of silence. Sometimes silence is loud; you become so aware of it that you hear it, even feel it enveloping you. That’s the type of silence that grasped the audience at pianist Jon Nakamatsu’s recital Saturday in Saratoga as he played Chopin.
Nakamatsu grew up in San Jose, still lives here and retains a special relationship with local audiences while tending to his busy career. His South Bay recitals, including this one at the McAfee Center at Saratoga High School, often verge on “We love you, Jon” affairs, packed with family, friends and longtime listeners.
Which is all well and good, but doesn’t explain that silence.
What explained it Saturday was Nakamatsu’s understated way of attuning his audience to the music at hand, Chopin’s Sonata No. 3 in B minor, Op. 58, and especially its slow, pared-back third movement, the Largo. He wasn’t just playing. He was listening. And as he listened, we listened, and every detail zoomed into unusual focus: every trill and quaver, every bit of aching melody, all quietly delivered and standing out against that silence.
Like any good recitalist, Nakamatsu balances form and flow, structure and lyricism, the architecture large and small of any piece of music. Sometimes he can seem overly meticulous. But there’s always a moment in his recitals — and usually there are many such moments — when straightforward statement turns into poetry. And that’s when you realize Nakamatsu’s sleight-of-hand; he’s been fooling you all along, standing off to the side, getting his ego out of the way and letting the music speak. It spoke powerfully throughout Saturday’s recital, which wrapped up the Steinway Society’s 2008-09 season. And it spoke uniquely. One of Nakamatsu’s trademarks is to explore worthy, offbeat repertory. He has championed music by Josef Wolfl, a forgotten contemporary of Beethoven’s, and Loris Tjeknavorian, the contemporary Armenian-Iranian composer whose piano music is drenched with ethnic rhythms.
Saturday, Nakamatsu played music by Muzio Clementi, generally described as the first composer to write specifically for the piano — not the harpsichord, not the fortepiano, but the piano. He composed prolifically, but isn’t performed all that much. Mozart thought him a “charlatan,” a graceless composer, a “mere mechanicus.” But Beethoven admired him. So did Vladimir Horowitz. And playing Clementi’s Sonata in F-sharp minor, Op. 25, No. 5, Nakamatsu exposed the lyricism within its mechanical speedways. He zipped about like Art Tatum, then downshifted and got downright lacy, softly probing a melancholy song with exceptional clarity. Beautiful stuff.
He followed it with Robert Schumann’s “Carnaval,” a piece that can be maddeningly musty — “enigmatic,” to use Nakamatsu’s own adjective. But he managed to open a window and air out this recital warhorse, in which Schumann composed portraits of himself along Chopin, Paganini and well-known figures from the Commedia dell’arte. Dancing his way through Schumann’s ballroom — narcotized one minute, frenzied the next — Nakamatsu gave a lesson in variation of color, attack and touch.
But it was only leading to his Chopin, with its sculpted pianissimos and the way he let a single chord decay, just hanging there, enclosed by the silence.
Finally the audience — which included his parents, David and Karen Nakamatsu, and his fiancee, Kathryn Chang, a Saratoga High chemistry teacher — brought its hero back for encores by Mendelssohn (The “Rondo capriccioso”) and Beethoven, whose “Moonlight” Sonata, the opening Adagio, put a restful cap on a super night.
