Wigmore Hall, London
In the first of five recitals of Mozart piano works the 24-year-old pianist found proportion and purpose to music that clearly means a great deal to him.

Now 24, Mao Fujita won the Clare Haskil piano competition in Switzerland in 2017, and shared second prize in the Tchaikovsky piano competition in Moscow two years later. The Japanese pianist has since made a handful of appearances in the UK, mostly playing the big showy 19th-century repertoire that seems inevitably to be expected of prizewinners, but for his Wigmore debut he has opted for something very different – a survey of Mozart’s piano sonatas presented this week across five recitals.

While cycles of the Beethoven sonatas may be almost commonplace, Mozart’s piano music rarely seems to receive similar concentrated attention. But it’s clearly music that means a great deal to Fujita; he included one of the sonatas in his prize-winning programme in Moscow, and last year released recordings of all of them for Sony Classical . And it was obvious from the very beginning of his first Wigmore programme that he does have something personal and fresh to bring to these works. His first sonata was the C major K279, the earliest to survive, but he had opened his recital with the Variations on Ah vous dirai-je, maman K265, perfectly striking a balance in both between muscular clarity and elegance, the exquisite and the down to earth, while never threatening to become precious or twee.