Reflections on the Yoshito Numasawa Piano Recital 2025 Tetsu Ogihara, Representative Director, PSO

Romanticism was an era—extending beyond music to encompass literature, painting, and science—in which the emotions, imagination, and contemplation emerging from the depths of individual interiority were expressed with candor and abundance. It was a time when artistic expression manifested as a complex admixture, inextricably blending profound truths with fallacy, oscillating between certainty and ambiguity.

Romantic art is not constructed upon explicit logic, clear narratives, or a universally shared grammar; rather, it is deeply rooted in the obscure domains of personal emotion, introspection, visions, and dreams. Romantic artists prioritized how they felt over what they intended to say . examined, while the recipient is granted interpretive freedom, they are simultaneously burdened with semantic instability and the difficulty of deciphering the work.

Yet, it is precisely within this lack of clarity—within this fluctuation and difficulty—that Romantic art possesses the power to evoke deep affect and resonance that transcends mere explanation or intellectual understanding. While such a reaction is not guaranteed, engagement with this art is rarely facile; it becomes a locus of silence that demands a response from the listener.

To conclude a concert in mystery is not to offer a decisive period, but to lower the curtain while leaving a question hanging in the air. Works characterized by grandeur of scale, extreme emotional states, and structural ambiguity refuse simple semantic assignment or convenient narrativization. They do not seek to comfort the listener, nor do they resolve neatly. Perhaps it is for this very reason that such musics retain its power to speak to us today.

For classical music to be received as true art in the contemporary world, we must not relinquish the fundamental ontological inquiry: "What is art?" This requires an attitude that treats music not as entertainment mere, but as an expression demanding serious engagement. Grieg, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, and Rachmaninoff all created their works while confronting the deep abyss of life. To respond to their music, we, too, must possess a sensibility that listens for the urgency and the presence of silence lurking behind the pleasant façade of sound.

It is the pianist Yoshito Numasawa who quietly accepts this very inquiry within his performance practice. His repertoire selection is rooted in a dimension far removed from commercial expediency or immediate accessibility; each piece emerges from his own internal questioning and his dialogue with the art form. The PSO (Piano Scholarship Osaka) was established precisely to support such choices by young artists and to place trust in their process of growth. Respecting these inevitable choices—which cannot be measured by the metric of instant clarity—is synonymous with believing in the act of art itself.

The "inscrutability" intrinsic to Romantic music, and the "enigma" found in the specific works Yoshito Numasawa has dared to select—by accepting these elements head-on, the question of "What is art?" is drawn toward us, the audience. To believe in the polysemy of the work itself, and to believe in the inevitability of the artist's choice: is this double trust not the quiet starting point required for us to truly face classical music today?