All this week on Classic Drive, Lorcan will feature music from '72 Preludes - Chopin Scriabin Yashiro' by Mao Fujita.
Japanese pianist Mao Fujita presents an ambitious project: matching sets of 24 Preludes by three composers, Frédéric Chopin, Alexander Scriabin and Akio Yashiro. Fujita unites the Europe in which he now lives with the Japan where he was born and raised.
Chopin’s landmark set of 24 Préludes, completed in 1839, was the first work to treat the piano prelude as a self-contained work capable of standing alone. After the model laid down in Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, the set traverses every key from C major to D minor, alternating major tonalities with their relative minors.
On his new album 72 Preludes, Fujita treats Chopin’s expressive yet elusive cycle as the basis for a dialogue that traverses borders and epochs. In 1884, Russian visionary Alexander Scriabin began work on his own set of 24 Preludes, directly inspired by Chopin’s. Scriabin’s pieces build on the grace and fluency of Chopin’s - also using his key scheme - while showing glimpses of the composer’s emerging radical harmonic and rhythmic character. They suggest that Scriabin, known for music on a huge scale, was an exquisite miniaturist.