Music critics become so accustomed to the emergence of new young pianists heralded as remarkable that a certain cynicism is apt to overtake us. When, therefore, I read that Yuki Matsuzawa started playing the piano at the age of five (well, so did a lot of us), that by her early teens she had amassed a vast repertoire including, among much else, the ''complete works'' [sic] of Chopin (which makes one blink a bit), and that she has won prizes in ''many of the world's leading music competitions'' (unspecified), I was not specially impressed. But from the very first notes, this disc immediately makes it clear that she is indeed something special: in fact, after listening critically to it several times, I will go further and declare her the most exciting newcomer this year to the record catalogue. It is not just that she has an unassailably secure technical mastery, dealing with apparent ease and panache with the formidable virtuosity required by, for example, the Ninth, Tenth and Twelfth Studies of Op. 8, nor that she commands a great range of dynamics, from Scriabin's quietissimo to his most thunderously passionate climaxes—and it is rare to find a pianist observing indications so absolutely exactly yet so seemingly naturally, without a trace of being applied mechanically. Her Op. 8 Etudes I find even better than Piers Lane's. As the first one reveals, she possesses that almost teasing lightness that Pasternak (who knew Scriabin) tells us was typical of his playing; and in lyrical passages such as the dreamy poetic Andante of the Third Sonata her tone is ravishingly beautiful. She is meticulous about detail (note her distinction between detached quavers and legato crotchets in the right hand of Op. 8 No. 7), and she has a sensitive feeling for phrase and structure and a proper appreciation of the expressive implications of key shifts (e.g. in Op. 8 No. 8).
She brings off the self-questioning of the Third Sonata, lingering over its initial subject, and the neurosis of the Fourth, with its passing echoes of Tristan, the chromatic appoggiaturas which give the first movement's harmonies a special character, and a truly fleeting volando in its second movement (which contains that direction in an Italian that never was, giobilosco). In the Fifth Sonata, written when Scriabin had fallen under the influence of theosophy, and making so great a change in his idiom (teetering as it does on the edge of atonality), she is convincingly deft, if taking the languido sections very freely. This is a brilliant recording debut, and I await with impatience her future performances.'