Kobayashi Tatsuaki

This year, GENUIN and the German Music Council, together with Deutschlandfunk Kultur, are once again presenting a prizewinner of the German Music Competition: clarinetist Lyuta Kobayashi. Not only has he been successful in this competition, he has already won several prizes despite his young age. In his program of works by Johannes Brahms, Jörg Widmann, Robert Schumann, and the klezmer clarinetist Helmut Eisel, he will be accompanied by the no less talented pianist Julian Emanuel Becker, who this year was the youngest participant to win a prize at the 32nd St Albans International Organ Competition (UK).

The 2015 International Chopin Competition in Warsaw was so thick with talent that even as fine a Chopin interpreter as Aimi Kobayashi did not make the medal stand (she did place in the round of ten). She's an exceptional pianist who brings the power and speed of the piano stars of yore, who often plays Liszt as well as Chopin. On this release of Chopin's preludes, plus a few other Chopin hits, listen to the well-worn Prelude in C minor, Op. 28, No. 20, where the imposing opening chords seem to pulse through the whole work. Kobayashi's passagework in the faster preludes is fleet but never muddy, and where Chopin has embedded a melody, she catches it.

Aimi Kobayashi, who rose to prominence as a prizewinner at the 2021 International Chopin Piano Competition, has been praised by Gramophone as a pianist who can “rivet the attention through fine-drawn line and hushed dynamics as much as through vivid gesture and brute force”.