By MIKE DUNHAM
Natsuki Fukasawa

Some sort of record for the briefest burst of applause ever must have been set at pianist Natsuki Fukasawa's recital at UAA on Friday night. The first piece on the program was Mendelssohn's "Fantasy on 'The Last Rose of Summer,'" which few if any of the members of the audience could have heard before. The unfamiliar work based on a very familiar tune ends quietly with slow spaces between the final notes. Only one person in the Fine Arts Building Recital Hall clapped, and that person clapped exactly once then stopped. Like this:

Second to last note. Silence. Last note. Silence. CLAP! Silence. Next piece.

Which was Liszt's paraphrase of a theme from Beethoven's song cycle, "An die ferne Geliebte," a generally more entertaining composition that concluded in such a way as to have the crowd applauding in the normal fashion.

Chopin's Sonata No. 3 rounded out the first half. Fukasawa grappled with the technically ferocious outer movements with rigid concentration. There was little of the nuance or sensitivity noted by critics elsewhere until she got to the inner movements.

After intermission, she lit into the first movemetn of "Faschingsschwank aus Wien" by Schumann with great authority. Inflexibility took some of the fun out of the Intermezzo, but the hand-crossing in the Finale was exciting to watch.

The program concluded with two Etudes-Tableaux by Rachmaninoff, where her steeliness worked most effectively. There was no applause between these two items, incidently, which speaks to the sophistication of those in attendance; these included several of the best and most knowledgeable pianists in town. But zero applause is not the same as a single slap of four fingers on one palm.

That initial oddness aside, this "all romantic" program had a lot of delicious music.

For an encore, she played Percy Grainger's arrangement of a song by John Dowland, which was a lot more Grainger than Dowland and a great pleasure to hear. Grainger - among the most important musicians of his day - is hardly known now. This adaptation, mixing the Elizabethan original tune with hints of romantic, salon and even jazz pianism, makes a good argument for reinvestigating his scores.