Pianist Shinya Kiyozuka appeared on Tetsuko Kuroyanagi's long-running talk show "Tetsuko's Room" (TV Asahi) broadcast on February 25th. He talked about how he was taught by pianist Hiroko Nakamura, who passed away in 2016.
Nakamura had not taken on any apprentices, but "my radical mother pushed me. She made the decision by force." Even though I was already learning from a teacher, one morning my mother suddenly told me, "I'm going to go to Hiroko Nakamura starting today." I received instruction from her for about four or five years, from around the second year of junior high school until high school.
On the first day, I was lectured for about 30 minutes to an hour about the proper way to greet people. Kiyozuka said, "I was lucky to be able to learn the proper way to greet people, because there was no one to teach me that kind of thing." As for Nakamura, he said, "I was scared at the time, but I'm grateful to him. I wish I could have expressed my gratitude to him more clearly while he was alive."
When he was scheduled to perform Chopin's Concerto No. 1 in a concert with the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, he had sheet music published by various publishers, but he thought he would try practicing with something different from the one he usually uses, so he pulled out one and noticed that it seemed to be the one he had used in his lessons with Sensei Hiroko, and when he flipped through it, there were notes from Sensei Hiroko written on it.
The score is a very romantic piece, the second movement "Romance," which is said to have been written by the young Chopin for his first love. In the margin above the staff, Nakamura wrote, "Sweet and fleeting, like a hazy night in the spring." "When I see this, I remember that every word was as beautiful as a poem."
Next to it was a practical note saying, "Be careful not to play too slowly, as you will not be able to hold on." Kiyozuka recalled, "Because I played romantically, he warned me in the next lesson, saying, 'That's too much.'"
