MAO FUJITA

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A resounding success when they were published in Paris when Chopin was just 29, the Preludes Op.28 had such resonance for the composer that he had them performed at his funeral just ten years later. More generally, their influence has led to them being reinterpreted by many artists in the modern musical world, from Mompou to Bill Evans and from Busoni to Donna Summer. Endorsing the Prelude genre, fixing their number and keys on the same principle as Bach’s Preludes and Fugues or, more recently, Paganini’s Caprices (twenty years earlier), there is a real before and after to Op.28. 

Scriabin remembered this when, for his first major composition, he wrote 24 Preludes, inspired by Chopin’s work. It would be wrong to imagine that they all come from the same musical gesture; they were composed over a period of almost 8 years, reflecting the composer’s intellectual development. 1888, the year in which Scriabin composed his first Preludes, was also the year in which he entered the Moscow Conservatory and met his friend and rival Rachmaninoff. In 1896, Scriabin completed the last Préludes; he also scored a huge success in a Paris recital that really kicked off his international career. The Preludes bear witness to these multiple life experiences in a polymorphous, labyrinthine aesthetic, sometimes in tonal mode, sometimes in pentatonic scales. A whole universe of aphorisms, great lyrical pages and tumultuous torrents, in a remarkably concise collection that Mao Fujita, a pianist known for the precocity and maturity of his interpretations, has made his own.