Nearly a decade after his Van Cliburn International Piano Competition gold medal victory, Jon Nakamatsu still strikes me as a solid, dependable, thoroughly professional, yet somewhat generic musician. You can casually listen to this all-Liszt release and find everything pretty much shipshape on the surface, not to mention genuine flashes of poetry and virtuosic élan–the Sonnetto del Petrarca No. 104’s climax, the rapid-fire leaps in Mephisto-Waltz No. 1, and the Second Hungarian Rhapsody’s coda. But as the reviewer’s time-honored cliché goes, “something’s missing.”
Nakamatsu’s choppy, prosaic delivery of the Dante Sonata’s opening measures, along with his meanderingly phrased central lyrical section are just two examples of how the music’s narrative, quasi-orchestral momentum elude the pianist. In the three Petrarca Sonnettos, the pianist sometimes under-projects the main melodies to the point where they melt into subsidiary lines, and as a consequence the music either drags or seems just to sit there.
Perhaps I’d have enjoyed Nakamatsu’s winsome rubatos and fanciful nuances in the Valse-Impromptu had he incorporated them within a steadier, more direct rhythmic framework (even the usually idiosyncratic Georges Cziffra plays this piece relatively straight). Judging by his flaccid performance of the Schumann/Liszt Widmung (a Cliburn specialty), you’d think that Nakamatsu had never heard the original song. Frülingsnacht lacks a real sense of line–as well as the marvelous, three-dimensional melody/accompaniment perspective distinguishing Josef Lhevinne’s ancient and still-unsurpassed recording. If only the artistry contained on this excellently engineered release had matched the cover art’s demonic vision.
