Sometimes the public is right. The 37-year-old Moscow-born pianist Evgeny Kissin has had a rapturous mass following from his career's precocious start, while critics have tended to dismiss him as a brilliant automaton, a capricious exponent of flawless technical bravura, a prodigious porcelain doll. But he has steadily demonstrated that he is no run-of-the-mill wunderkind. Although he still seems somewhat childlike on the platform, comporting himself with an odd, unaware stiffness, his music-making has all along had a distinctive and compelling power.
His astonishing technique is not only reflected in his crackling virtuosity, thunderous fortissimi and breathless tintinnabulations, but in ordinary matters of touch and phrasing. They never are ordinary with Kissin. His phrases have a svelte eloquence, signed off with a ping. Every note is a thing of beauty. His touch evokes the immaculateness of a Michelangeli, but to the Italian's fastidiousness he adds an at-homeness with gigantic, bass-dominated, bell-like sonority characteristic of the Russian school. The full extent of his sonorous power is shocking. It is surely a sense of great strength held in reserve that fascinates us in his phrasing and in his playing altogether.
A withholding quality seemed a specific part of his interpretation of Prokofiev's Sonata No 8, in the first half of his packed Barbican recital. This was by no means a crowd-pleasing choice of repertory. In Prokofiev-sonata terms, that would have been the Sixth or Seventh. The Eighth, which forms with those two a so-called War Trilogy (1940-44), has plenty of passages of spectacular forcefulness, but its presiding note is a strangely poised lyricism. In the andante dolce opening - which he rendered in severe moderato fashion - and subsequently, Kissin made the lyricism more tough than tender, a resistant element through which we had, as it were, to push hard to reach the release of the fast music. The approach risked mannerism, but was insightful. Lyricism, he seemed to be saying, can be a true counterforce to violence.
His dispatch, at the start of the programme, of selections from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet ballet music was dazzling. The Chopin sequence of the second half gave him opportunities to display a ravishing legato line, and in the group of Etudes, customary fears were reversed. One worried not whether he would be able to bring them off, but whether they really were difficult enough to bring out his best: those amazing, novel, high-definition timbres of which he is capable. When he took the final applause, he had the look (though his face is close to expressionless) of one surprised to find a realm of non-piano-playing mortals below the ether of infallible musicianship, and was relishing the experience as if it were a warm bath. It was disconcerting, though - and downright rude - when a sizeable number of those mortals tittered at the voice in which he announced his encore.
A Moscow-born pianist not much older than Kissin gave a recital two nights later to a respectable, if not packed, audience at Wigmore Hall. Lilya Zilberstein is best known as a duo partner of Martha Argerich, but should be celebrated for herself. She has none of Kissin's razzmatazz and otherworldly, Michael Jackson aura. She sits squarely at the keyboard and plays without fuss, and what happens is wonderful. Sumptuous technical mastery and unaffected musicality were inseparable in readings of Brahms and Rachmaninov that had an instant rightness. The former's late Three Intermezzi, Op 117, made a meditative and stirring complement to his early, scintillating Variations on a Theme of Paganini, Op 35, Books I and II, their prodigious demands met with imperturbability. Her ease with the more massive sonorous moments was a reminder of her masterful Russian training - and a link with Kissin.
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There was no danger, though, that this Russian would play Rachmaninov as if he were the nationalist Mussorgsky. She was well able to realise the orchestral splendour of many of the 13 Preludes, Op 32 - most notably the D flat final one - but one was as much aware of a Fauré-like nuance in the writing as one was of the clangour of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. A recital to remember.