The classical-music world never stands still. There is a constant stream of new, young talents who impress and surprise.
That’s certainly true in the keyboard realm, where multiple figures have jumped into the limelight, including Alexandre Kantorow, who the won the International Tchaikovsky Competition in 2019, and Yuncham Lim, the gold medalist at the 2022 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.
Also prominent on that list is the pianist Mao Fujita, who will make his Chicago Symphony Orchestra debut Nov. 5-8 under guest conductor Marek Janowski.
Fujita first came to Chicago in March 2025, when he appeared on the Symphony Center Presents Piano Series in a recital featuring works by Chopin, Mozart and Beethoven. He was excited about his inaugural visit to the city.
“I recently talked to [conductor] Klaus Mäkelä, who will be [the Chicago Symphony Orchestra] music director [starting] in 2027/28, and he said it is an amazing city with amazing people. I am looking forward to being there,” he said in an interview before that concert.
Now 27, Fujita began taking piano lessons when he was 3 years old; because his older brother also studied piano, he thought that every child could play the piano. The younger Fujita was disabused of that notion after he started kindergarten and discovered he was an outlier.
At age 12, he further realized that his keyboard skills set him apart when his parents entered him in several competitions, and he won first prize in the junior section of an international contest in Taiwan.
When he was older, he went on to win the Clara Haskil International Piano Competition in Switzerland in 2017 and was one of two entrants to win a silver medal at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in 2019 behind Kantorow.
Fujita was especially interested in the Tchaikovsky Competition, because he wanted to have a chance to play in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, which opened in 1901, and has become one of the world’s most famous concert stages.
“My hero was Vladmir Horowitz,” he said of the celebrated Russian pianist. “I have seen so many videos of his concerts, and one of them was him playing at the Moscow Conservatory. And it was something special, because the very first piece he played was Mozart’s K. 330, his beautiful C Major sonata, and I wanted to play this sonata and I wanted to play in the same place as Horowitz.”
At the same time, Fujita sought to get the feedback from the distinguished juries of the two European competitions, because all of his studies had been in Japan, and he was eager to hear what others outside his homeland had to say about his playing.
Fujita is in no way a social-media devotee, noting that he has other people handling his Instagram and other accounts, but he was willing to give it a try when he appeared on "The F1RST TAKE," the Japanese YouTube channel, in January 2025.
With more than 10.5 million subscribers, the channel typically features pop artists who perform live against a simple white background. Fujita performed the third movement from Beethoven’s famed Piano Sonata No. 23 (Appassionata) and generated considerable attention.
In 2024, in a more traditional vein, Fujita released a two-volume album on Sony Classical titled “72 Preludes,” which features an unusual lineup of just preludes by three different composers — Frederic Chopin, Alexander Scriabin and Akio Yashiro — that span more than 100 years and reflect the development of the form.
Unlike, say, a Mozart piano sonata, a prelude might last no more 30 or 40 seconds. “In making an interpretation, it’s quite difficult in that there is no exposition, no development, no recapitulation,” Fujita said.
During his Chicago recital, he performed one of the selections off that album, Chopin’s 24 Preludes, Op. 28, as well as three works that all incorporate variations, including the Appassionata Sonata, which as Fujita quickly pointed out, has a slow second movement that is a set of variations in D-flat major. “So, variations and preludes is the theme,” he said.
For his CSO debut, he will serve as soloist in Richard Strauss’ Burlesque in D Minor, a Brahms-flavored work for piano and orchestra that Strauss wrote in 1885-86 when he was 23. But it didn’t have its premiere until 1890 with soloist Eugen d’Albert, because the original intended soloist, Hans von Bülow, rejected the piece in part for being too difficult to play. The work, which lasts about 20 minutes and unfolds in a single grand movement, is now regarded as one of the masterpieces of Strauss’ youthful output
Writing for Bachtrack in October 2025, music critic Frank Kuznik praised Fajita’s performance of the work with conductor Semyon Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic.
“Fujita showed how it’s done with his dexterous handling of the frenetic runs that pile up like a car crash late in the piece, blazing through them with assuredness and uncommon precision,” Kuznik wrote. “His technical virtuosity was matched by a graceful touch that kept the outrageously dense, complex cascades of sound from ever becoming harsh.”
