Documentary, performance put spotlight on blind pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii

Japanese pianist Nobuyuki “Nobu” Tsujii has been blind since birth, but that doesn’t mean that he can’t “see” the audience when he walks into a concert hall.

Filmmaker Peter Rosen, who filmed Tsujii’s winning performances at the 2009 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition for the documentary “Surprise in Texas,” was intrigued to learn that the 26-year-old pianist has his own kind of vision that does not involve the eyes.

“Somehow he imagines things from a very acute sense of hearing,” Rosen said in a phone interview from New York. “He can walk into a concert hall, know how big it is, what shape it is, how many seats there are, just from the way he hears things. So he has a world in his imagination that may be even more beautiful.”

Rosen recently made a biographical film about the gifted Japanese pianist that incorporates home videos of him as a child; new footage of the pianist during his 2011 Carnegie Hall debut, which was also made into a film; his subsequent tour of America; and his return to Japan, where he played for the survivors of the Fukushima earthquake.

“It’s the last chapter in our trilogy,” Rosen said of the new film. “It’s putting together the whole story of Nobuyuki.”

“Touching the Sound: The Improbable Journey of Nobuyuki Tsujii” will be shown at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 28, at the Green Music Center’s Schroeder Hall. The pianist is flying in for a post-screening discussion of the film. He will then perform a piano recital at 7:30 p.m. May 1 in Weill Hall of works by Chopin, Liszt and Beethoven.

“Touching the Sound,” which also screened at the Sonoma International Film Festival, is the latest in a long list of films by Rosen that explore the world of classical music. It all started back in the 1970s with his documentary “Leonard Bernstein: Reflections,” due to be re-released next year on the 100th anniversary of the famous composer-conductor’s birth.

“Once you do a film about somebody who is such a star, a lot of musicians were coming to me with projects - Yo-Yo Ma, Midori, Isaac Stern,” Rosen said. “I did quite a few things with Stern at Carnegie Hall.”

Rosen also made the film “Playing on the Edge” about Russian pianist Olga Kern, who had overcome personal challenges of divorce and single motherhood in her ultimately successful bid to win the 2001 Van Cliburn Competition.

“We really put her on the map,” he said. “When she won that, it was the end of a career that was going downhill … and it’s a story that a lot of people related to.”

When Tsujii showed up at the 2009 competition, Rosen had actually grown a bit tired of filming the piano contest.

“You start with 30 young pianists, and you follow each of them, and then 12, and then 6 are left,” he said. “And you keep filming until you have a story about the winner.”

Instead, Rosen decided to just follow Tsujii around for three weeks, hoping against hope that the blind pianist, who must listen to the conductor’s breathing for cues and feel for the edges of the keyboard before playing, would win the gold medal.

In fact, he did win the gold, sharing the top prize with Chinese pianist Haochen Zhang. In addition to a cash award of $20,000, the pianist won three years of international concert tours and a CD recording, which catapulted him to rock-star status in his native land.

“He’s like a hero in Japan,” Rosen said. “Huge arenas are sold out wherever he goes. He has groupie followings. They call it Nobu fever.”

It was clear from an early age that Tsujii, born blind in Tokyo, was special. By age 2, he was able to play simple tunes on a toy piano after listening to his mother hum them first.

“We got all kinds of great family photos and home movies,” Rosen said. “He was such an unusual baby that his mother kept shooting everything.”

At age 7, he tried to learn music by reading Braille, but found that technique too cumbersome because he had to feel the Braille with one hand and play with the other.

“He decided to have his teacher play pieces at a very slow speed,” Rosen said. “And he listened to the recordings.”

Tsujii performed with the Osaka Century Symphony at age 10 and made his debut recital at Tokyo’s Suntory Hall at age 12. He graduated in 2011 from the Ueno Gakuen College of Music in Tokyo.

Despite his blindness, the pianist is able to play all of the classical repertoire, including challenging pieces by composers such as Rachmaninoff that include massive chords.

“He hardly ever misses a note,” Rosen said. “But on top of that … there’s something extra about him. His interpretation is so sensitive that it’s hard for people to stop crying when they hear him. There’s an extrasensory communication about him.”

As the dramatic arc of the film, Rosen presents the pianist as a symbol of hope for others with disabilities who must fight to achieve their dreams.

“This whole movie got to be some sort of spiritual experience,” Rosen said. “It wasn’t about a pianist anymore. It’s rare when a performer transcends the music and becomes a symbol for something else.”

The soundtrack is composed solely of music played by Tsujii, including a few modern pieces that he composed himself, such as “Elegy for the Victims of the Earthquake and Tsunami of March 11, 2011.”

“We had a terrific music library to choose from,” Rosen said. “He writes contemporary ballads, like the Beatles would perform.”

In the final scenes of the film, the pianist visits the desolate landscapes of Japan following the 2011 tsunami, accompanied by his devoted friend, translator and manager Nick Asano, who brings him on and off stage and helps him “see” the world around him by describing it.

When the pianist attended the film’s premiere in New York, he sat through the entire film, just as if he were watching it.

“Even though he can’t see anything, he knows all the scenes,” Rosen said. “He was there when we shot it, and he knows it by the soundtrack. … But only he knows what it looks like.”

Staff Writer Diane Peterson can be reached at 521-5287 or diane.peterson@pressdemocrat.com.