Former prodigy who now needs to take risks
Evgeny Kissin Barbican, London E2 ★★★
Middle age is always awkward for a virtuoso pianist. By then, memories of the dazzling youth are fading, and the accolades due to a grand old master are still some way off.
At 47, Evgeny Kissin is now in this phase. In his teens, he amazed the musical world with his flawlessly brilliant technique, and was described by seasoned critics as the greatest pianist they’d ever heard. This one-time child prodigy now feels somewhat becalmed, a quandary made more poignant by the fact there’s something weirdly indeterminate about his age. When he came onto the Barbican stage last night he had the portly gait of a middle-aged man, but still seemed smoothly baby-faced, as if the years haven’t touched him.
As for the playing, it still has that combination of heavy solidity and brilliance that marked the Russian school. In the opening piece, Chopin’s
Nocturne in F minor, the bass line was as solid as an iron girder. In the Nocturne in G major the trickling notes in the right hand were delicate, but only in the way a velvet glove on an iron fist is delicate.
Kissin’s amazing control, which never flags for a millisecond, gave Schumann’s big F minor sonata a riveting force. The composer wrote it during a period of enforced separation from his beloved Clara, and the music is full of hectic energy and suppressed anger.
There were plenty of other moments in the recital where a strange nervous energy found its match in Kissin’s hyper-alert yet massively sonorous playing, such as the hurricane portrayed in Debussy’s Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest (What the West Wind Saw), and the strange, eager rhythms of Scriabin’s 4th Sonata, which portrays a flight towards the sun.
It was all undeniably impressive, but in the end profoundly unsatisfying. There was a peculiar emotional disconnectedness in Kissin’s playing, revealed most vividly in two pieces by Debussy, the prelude inspired by the clown Ed Levine, and Golliwog’s Cakewalk (the latter an encore prompted by his fan’s cheers, though on the whole the audience seemed cool). Both pieces are laughout-loud funny, but Kissin clearly didn’t realise that; he just played them, with scrupulous care. The tender moments in Schumann’s sonata and Debussy’s Preludes were perfectly turned-out, but that was all; one never felt the press of real feeling. Embracing that involves risk to feel something in the moment rather than offering something preprepared. But it’s a risk Kissin must take if he’s to make the journey from prodigy to real artist.