27/04/2019- Review to the CD “Harmony” Klassik Heute

Her Chopin album satisfies listeners entirely: She is very correct in her cantabile piano touch as well as in her musical subtlety and fragility. With immanent vital energy, she describes poetic expression and deep intimacy in floating rhythm, but her sound on the piano is neither mellifluous nor blurred, even not in the never-ending slowness. The transparent clarity of her playing reminds that Chopin loved and admired Bach.

She plays “correctly”, that means that the four Mazurkas are rhythmic freely on account of consistency of delays and accelerations, but always her overmastering own phrasing. Wisely, she presses the pedal modestly. In the five Nocturnes, she interweaves the melodic right hand beautifully with the “accompanying” left hand.

Miyata’s Ballade No. 1, op. 23 has abundance of balladic passion and musing melancholy, the Scherzo No. 1 op. 20 seethes with turbulent power and the Nocturne No. 20 in C sharp minor op. posth, which ends up this album, is magical-impressionistic with glittering sparkling tones.

The sound engineer Wolfgang Schifermair manages wonderfully to capture the rich bass sound of the grand piano, as if you sat in the first row of an imaginary concert hall.

Rainer W. Janka [27.04.2019]