Manami Suzuki comes to London as the first Japanese and the first female winner of the Hamamatsu International Piano Festival. She brought with her an ambitious programme ranging from Bach to Szymanowski, that represented both a technical and an aesthetic challenge, quite apart from having to come to terms with the precise, pin-sharp dynamics of the larger performance space at King’s Place.
She passed these tests with poise, grace and power, and a subtle grading of tone and dynamics that took full advantage of the attributes of the hall and her choice of works to perform.
First up was a Haydn sonata that pointed two-ways, back to the world of the Baroque in its highly contrasted primary-colour episodes, but also forwards to early Beethoven in the subtle layering and unfurling of the slow movement. Suzuki articulated each movement crisply but missed the puckish, mischievous wit of some of the episodes that a performer such as the late Alfred Brendel always found in this music.
This was followed by the B-flat Prelude and Fugue from Book Two of the Well-Tempered Clavier. Here Suzuki was less persuasive, using a lot of pedal in the prelude and pulling the dynamics around willfully in the fugue, as if this was an arrangement by Busoni rather than the original work of Bach himself.
These strategies repaid richer dividends in two episodes of philhellene tone painting by Szymanowski, where Suzuki was absolutely in the zone. These Metopes are hugely demanding pieces to play, but she made light of the technical requirements, and absolutely captured the uneasy shimmery appeal of the Sirens and the quirky wilfulness of Nausicaa. These works deserve to be heard more frequently and she is a powerful advocate for them. Her performance suggested that she will be a fine interpreter of Debussy too in time, given that his spirit and harmonic language hovers powerfully over the music.
The first half concluded with another piece of shifting moods, the second Valse-Caprice of Fauré. At first it appears to be another of his exercises in refined, perfumed elliptical harmonies; but the middle section is something altogether more profound, a world away from the fripperies of the salon, and Suzuki probed this inward-looking music very deftly.
The remainder of the evening was wholly devoted to Schubert’s sonata D894 from 1826, a major statement equal in stature to the final three sonatas from the very end of his life. This was the highpoint of the evening in which Suzuki’s skill in refined dynamics was perfectly matched to the music. Whether in the dramatic contrasts of the second movement or in the serene sideslips from major to minor in the lengthy first movement the taste, pacing and judgement were precisely on point; and in the last two movements she found the idiomatic fit that was somewhat missing in the first two items on the programme. The lilting Ländler theme in the third movement did genuinely seem to take us out into the Viennese countryside in its boistrous enthusiasm; and in the finale she found a wit and playfulness to savour that is all-too-rare in these final darkening years of Schubert’s all-too-short life.
This was an impressive debut in every way, and enhanced by a wonderfully stylish teal outfit that nodded both to tradition and modernism in Japanese fashion and design.
King’s Place
23 January 2026
Photo Credit: Frances Marshall