Today, we release Mao Fujita’s eagerly-anticipated studio recording of Mozart’s complete piano sonatas in a five-album CD box set and digitally. A significant undertaking for any pianist, this project also marks the rising piano star’s Sony Classical debut. Described by The Times of London as “a musician of tremendous versatility and taste, with a poetic sense of pulse,” Fujita signed an exclusive contract with Sony Classical in 2021, following a solo debut at the Verbier Festival performing the same set of works.  

Of the series, the French magazine Toute la Culture praised Fujita for his sense of joy that came through in “interpretations of incredible intimacy.” Upending the image of Mozart’s music as written down fully-formed and without correction, Fujita approaches these sonatas with the understanding that Mozart, a pianist himself, often improvised during his own performances of the works and treated the scores as starting points for improvisation and embellishment. “He didn’t always play what he wrote,” the pianist explains of the composer. “When I play Mozart’s sonatas only according to what he wrote, it’s quite boring. We can, instead, do something special.” Toute la Culture commended this as well: “With a sound of pure, astonishing beauty, he inserts imaginative riffs here and there, but always with a respect for the classical style.”  

Stream and download the album here.