With a growing reputation as an eloquent stylist, Japanese pianist Mao Fujita is a musician whose natural poetic impulse is matched by his lack of ego. Born in Tokyo in 1998, he was still a student at the Tokyo College of Music when he took first prize at the Clara Haskil Piano Competition in Switzerland in 2017. If this success confirmed a natural empathy with music of the Classical period, especially Mozart, then his playing at the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition two years later, where he won the silver medal, revealed an artist with broader affinities, able to bring a similar communicative spirit to bigger-boned Romantic works. As a teenager, Fujita made several recordings for Naxos Japan featuring repertoire from Beethoven to Prokofiev, which highlight his sensitivity and versatility. A beautifully proportioned Chopin album (rec. 2019) impresses for its refined virtuosity, always subordinate to the music’s lyricism. In 2021, Fujita signed with Sony Classical, for whom his first recording is a survey of Mozart’s complete piano sonatas.