Evgeny Kissin is one of the foremost pianists of today, but at the same time he remains one of the most perplexing. When he first emerged on the international stage as a teenage prodigy in the 1980s, his potential seemed limitless; here, surely, was someone destined to be one of the keyboard greats. When, that is, his musical insights had grown to match his phenomenal technique.
Across the subsequent decades, we have waited for such a growth to take place, but increasingly that has been more in hope than expectation. And hearing Kissin in recital again, for me the first time since 2014, what was immediately striking was how little his music-making has changed, how in many important ways the now fiftysomething pianist is precisely the same performer I remembered; the technique may be as dazzling as ever, but it is still combined with an unremittingly bright piano sound that is just as shallow and unvaried as before, and a musical approach that is just as barnstormingly unsubtle.
Kissin hardly helped himself by opening his Barbican programme with music by two composers who seem almost uniquely unsuited to his particular gifts – Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, and Mozart’s D major Piano Sonata K311. There even seemed an impatience about the way he rushed through the Mozart, hardly allowing the music the chance to breathe, over-emphasising the outlines of the theme of the slow movement, as if he was only concerned to move on as quickly as possible to music with which he felt an affinity.
That music was first of all Chopin’s F sharp minor Polonaise, Op 44, which received a thunderous, implacably fierce performance. It was certainly one effective way of playing Chopin, even though other pianists look for and find more colour and harmonic subtlety in every bar than Kissin ever does. But in a second half devoted to Rachmaninov, he was in his element, revelling in his effortless command of the technical challenges of a group of the Op 39 Études-Tableaux, and shaping their melodies far more naturally and instinctively than anything in the Mozart; it was no surprise that he stuck to Rachmaninov for his encores, three of the Morceaux de Fantaisie, Op 3.
