Carnegie Hall

With an innate musical sensitivity and naturalness to his artistry, 24-year-old pianist Mao Fujita has already impressed many leading musicians as one of those special talents that come along only rarely. He is equally at home with Mozart and the major Romantic repertoire.

Born in Tokyo, Mr. Fujita was still studying at the Tokyo College of Music in 2017 when he won First Prize—along with the Audience Award, Prix Modern Times, and Prix Coup de Coeur—at the prestigious Clara Haskil International Piano Competition in Switzerland, bringing him to the attention of the international music community. He was also the silver medalist at the 2019 International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, where his special musical qualities received exceptional attention from a jury of leading musicians.

Mr. Fujita has been invited to appear in recital at major international festivals that include Klavier-Festival Ruhr, Tsinandali, and Riga-Jurmala, among others. Other recent and upcoming highlights include performances with the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Royal Concertgebouw, and Lucerne Festival orchestras; Munich Philharmonic; Orchestre philharmonique de Radio France; Yomiuri Nippon and Tokyo Metropolitan symphony orchestras; Royal and Israel philharmonic orchestras; RAI National Symphony Orchestra; and Filarmonica della Scala. Conductors with whom he has collaborated include Vasily Petrenko, Christoph Eschenbach, Riccardo Chailly, and Andris Nelsons.

In November 2021, Mr. Fujita signed an exclusive multi-album deal with Sony Classical International, a partnership that allows him to explore many facets of the repertoire across several releases. His studio recording of Mozart’s complete piano sonatas was released in October 2022 following an acclaimed series of performances of the sonatas at the Verbier Festival in 2021. Mr. Fujita has been invited to perform the same set of works, interspersed with sets of variations, over five concerts for his debut at London’s Wigmore Hall at the end of the 2022–2023 season.

Mr. Fujita began taking piano lessons at age three. He won his first international prize in 2010 at the World Classic in Taiwan, and became a laureate of numerous national and international competitions that include the Rosario Marciano International Piano Competition in Vienna (2013), the Zhuhai International Mozart Competition for Young Musicians (2015), and the Gina Bachauer International Young Artists Piano Competition (2016). In 2022, he moved to Berlin for further studies with Kirill Gerstein.