To judge by his piano playing, I wouldn’t wish to live on Planet Kissin. So often it seems an unyielding place, precisely ordered, freezing cold. A heart can sometimes be glimpsed, but what predominates is iron and ice.
That’s certainly the world that Evgeny Kissin showed in this polished but often dispiriting recital of Prokofiev and Chopin. True, Prokofiev is not a composer to wear his heart on his sleeve. But he’s human and he loves warming quirks — and their scarcity in Kissin’s opening selection from Romeo and Juliet gave early warning that the pianist was still locked in the fridge. Where was the flighty, fluttering Juliet? The heroine I heard was business-like, brisk — a strapping tennis player, I expect. Mercutio then arrived snarling and the feuding Montagues and Capulets, blunt as nails, beat our ears black and blue.
The Eighth Sonata threw Kissin’s clean brutality and thumping left hand on a larger and deeper canvas. The meteoric element in Prokofiev came easily, as did structural control. But the first movement’s bleak terrain needed more ghostly echoes of life, and the finale’s mock flag-waving ending sounded more bad-tempered than ironic. Subtleties went thataway. So, mostly, did pleasure.
Perhaps the more romantic Chopin, a specialty since childhood, would help Kissin to thaw. The Nocturne encore (Op 27, No 2) sported moonlight warmth. Little green shoots also emerged in the Polonaise-Fantaisie: tones were gentle and Kissin captured its teasing momentum. But tenderness still seemed feigned. A genuine heartbeat was also elusive in the Mazurkas, especially the A minor (Op 50, No 1), where phrasings in the middle lay dead and dissected on a surgical slab.
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Most of Kissin’s selection though were ?tudes — Chopin pieces where a pianist’s defective heart can easily be camouflaged by displays of prodigious technique. Eight times in a row Kissin’s clear tone, razor-sharp articulation and muscular mastery of simultaneous demands marched him to victory of a kind — the hollow kind, where you admire the glittering cascades, velvet arpeggios and plangent tunes carved out of mist, but stop to question whether the pianist creating this brilliant array is human or machine.