Famed Japanese jazz pianist Yosuke Yamashita has expressed his burning passion for music by setting his piano on fire.

At a sunset performance on at beach in Ishikawa Prefecture, western Japan, the 66-year-old Yamashita, wearing a firefighter's uniform, recently played an improvised jazz piece before about 500 spectators seated in a wide semicircle around him.

No sooner had he begun playing, the piano burst into performance for a full ten minutes before all the strings were burnt out or snapped and the piano went quiet.

"I did not think I was risking my life but I was almost suffocating from the smoke that was continuously getting into my eyes and nose.

“I had decided to keep on playing until the piano stopped making sounds, so though I did not mean it but it ended up having a life-or-death battle between the piano and myself," said Mr Yamashita.

This extraordinary piano performance was not the first experience for him.

He did it 35 years ago when he was a fledgling pianist but then it was not his idea.

Old idea revived

At that time, a Japanese graphic designer Kiyoshi Awazu asked him to play for the subject of his short film "burning piano" in 1973.

Mr Yamashita came up with the idea of its reproduction when he saw that film again recently after decades of limbo at the retrospective of Kiyoshi Awazu, which has been held at the 21st Century museum of contemporary art Kanazawa through this month.

This reproduction was held as a contribution to the exhibition with the help of the museum.

"I think though it is just a ten minute of performance, it holds an essence of artistic expression because he risked his life and career and took a serious approach to a project which is very ephemeral and unperfectable," said Ken Awazu, the son of Kiyoshi Awazu and the art producer who helped to reproduce his father's invention.

After the performance, there were some criticisms in Japan that it was wasting a piano.

But the organizer, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art of Kanazawa, countered the argument as the burnt-down grand piano was one of hundreds of decades-old donated pianos which affluent people once bought for their children but rarely-used and dumped to a scrapper.