Inspiration From Chopin, Beethoven

Brilliant, poetic, heroic and spontaneous, Nakamatsu’s Chopin album establishes the emotional opposite of the clean, accurate and faceless Romantic playing of recent decades.

The 1997 Van Cliburn International Competition winner creates real heat that illuminates as it consumes the composer’s musical poetry; genuine tears are the appropriate response to the young pianist’s rediscoveries of familiar territory. And the little-known, seldom-heard Opus 13 glitters, touches and inspires.

Throughout, Nakamatsu lets each separate item sing and speak for itself, with revelatory results. One has to go back to the heydays of Artur Rubinstein and Jorge Bolet to recall such thrills as are in these authoritative readings.

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