Nakura Is a Revelation on the Marimba

Debut artists and brand-new music are the life-blood of the critic’s profession, and any event that combines the two can be considered a jackpot. With the second concert in the 1999-2000 Jose Iturbi Gold Medal series, Monday night at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, then, one had to feel lucky.

Makoto Nakura, a competition-winning marimbist from Japan making his Southern California debut, played works by Kevin Putz and Jason Eckardt in local, West Coast and United States premieres. The rest of his provocative recital offered pieces by Bach, Brahms, Kreisler and Toshi Ichiyanagi.

Nakura brings not merely accurate and flying mallets, a sense of lyric intensity and a probing musicality to everything he plays, he also integrates his virtues into an entertaining whole.

Composer Putz--Nakura pronounced it “Poohtz”--served as assisting pianist in his own “Ritual Protocol in Three Movements” and in the Brahms, Kreisler and Ichiyanagi pieces.

His writing for the marimba, as also displayed in the program-opening solo suite, “Canyon,” is inventive, clever, haunting and poetic. An award winner for most of his young compositional career (he was born in 1972), he plays the piano with strong efficiency but with one of the ugliest tones--shallow, brittle and metallic--I have ever heard.

Nonetheless, the duo performances succeeded on their musical strengths alone. Nakura made wondrous sense out of both Bach’s transcribed Violin Sonata in G minor and Eckardt’s colorful, emotionally resonating “Transcience,” and the marimbist and pianist conquered the kaleidoscopic character of Ichiyanagi’s “Paganini Personel,” a set of variations on the 24th Caprice, with great flair.