Noriko Ogawa: Tsunami Appeal, Kings Place

Opening her piano recital with ‘La cathedrale engloutie’, Noriko Ogawa brought out the majestic pathos of Debussy’s submerged edifice: the perfectly-weighted chords created a heavy swell, and the bell tolled with watery clarity.

Then she made a speech. She had been waiting for a train on Japan’s east coast when the quake struck, and she found herself helplessly pulled into her nation’s great tragedy. Domiciled both in Britain and Japan, she couldn’t be seen running away, but friends assured her that the best thing she could do was give a concert in London whose proceeds would go to Japan’s dispossessed, and whose spirit would fly the flag for Japanese music at a time when concerts there were hard to stage.

Then this statuesque figure continued to play, beginning with an angry explosion of octaves and arpeggios entitled ‘Grudge’ by Rentaro Taki, who was born in 1879 and died 24 years later. Composed in the style of Beethoven, this was one of the first pieces of Westernised music to be published in the years following Japan’s decision to embrace Westernisation, and the title reflected its composer’s Keatsian fury in the face of death from TB.

Next came three characteristic pieces by Toru Takemitsu, the composer who single-handedly put Japanese modernism on the international map. Having had the honour of playing for him, and also of receiving his encouragement as he too prepared to die, Ogawa delivered these works with a pellucid and at times Debussyan grace. She had chosen them, she told us, because for her they expressed something of the Japanese people’s essence: patient and stoical, yet with powerful passions below the surface. Then she suspended a pair of bronze chopsticks above the piano, and nudged them while playing a piece by Yoshihiro Kanno entitled ‘A particle of water’. The rising and falling ripples of sound from the piano had a metallic sheen, silvered exquisitely by the perfumed miasma of the chopsticks.

After the interval Ogawa turned west: she is, after all, a major presence in British pianism too. If her account of Beethoven’s Opus 109 sonata prized steely certainty above poetic suggestiveness, what she did with Chopin’s Scherzo in B flat minor was like a fist nobly flourished in the face of fate.