Fujiwara Saves Best for Last on Debut Album

Arina Fujiwara on the cover of her debut album (from the Amazon.com Web page)

Today marks the release of Neon the debut album of pianist, composer, and arranger Arina Fujiwara. As of this writing, the most reliable source is the MP3 download Web page created by Amazon.com. Sadly, this is a “bare bones” site, providing little more than the track listing and an album cover image.

Fujiwara graduated from the Berklee College of Music in 2018. She then went on for graduate studies at the Manhattan School of Music and recently earned her Master of Music degree, having studied with Elio Villafranca and Joel Ross. Her debut album is a little less than half an hour in duration. Four of the six tracks are originals (including the title track). The other two are Fujiwara’s own arrangements. One is of the Japanese children’s song “Hotaru Koi.”

The other is the most engaging selection. It is the final track on the album and rises above the first five in every possible way. The track is listed simply as “Maple Leaf Rag;” but, between tempo and thematic content, Fujiwara explores a plethora of techniques for warping Scott Joplin’s “source content,” often into domains where the familiar theme is barely recognized. Sadly, the first five tracks of the album tend to be almost consistently bland (particularly when Fujiwara is accompanied by a string quartet). However, that last track is a highly imaginative paraphrase that almost recalls the inventiveness that Franz Liszt (who makes a brief appearance) brought to his treatments of Giuseppe Verdi.

This may account for only a tenth of the entire duration, but those three minutes make for an engaging experience that should not be disregarded!