Word: kissin
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...EVGENY KISSIN: CARNEGIE HALL DEBUT CONCERT (RCA Red Seal). From his daringly slow opening statement of Schumann's Symphonic Etudes, and throughout this recital of challenging works by Liszt, Chopin and Prokofiev, the Soviet prodigy, now 19, shows a potential for future greatness, with a command of tone, dynamics and phrasing that is always at the service of musical ends...
...Thus Kissin's Carnegie Hall recital in New York City last month was one of the most eagerly awaited American debuts of the past decade. It proved decisively that the advance word was no mere hype. Schumann's early "Abegg" Variations beguiled with youthful ardor and passion. The same composer's tricky Symphonic Etudes was taken at a daringly slow tempo initially, but Kissin made it work by, in effect, playing the series of challenging variations as if he were inventing the piece as he went along. After intermission, he tamed the ferocious Sixth Sonata by Sergei Prokofiev and concluded...
After thoughts of art come the practical things in life. As soon as he has learned to drive, Kissin plans to get a car. A girlfriend may take longer; currently he travels with his mother and his teacher. Relaxation takes the form of playing the rags of Scott Joplin and reading Pushkin and Tolstoy. He rejects the notion that he is still too young to understand the depths of his art. "For me, it's natural," he says. "Please don't take this as being immodest, but with my potential, I could have already done more than I have." Given...
Like most teenagers, Kissin is a romantic at heart, though his still rather narrow repertoire includes Mozart and Haydn as well as Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich. In Amsterdam last year he was scheduled to play the Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 1, even though the piece had by then become boring for him. The day before the performance brought the news that Andrei Sakharov had died. "That changed everything completely," he says. "I used to play the final movement with a lighthearted though sarcastic mood. After the news, it felt as though I had not performed the concerto in 10 years...
...Although Kissin's schedule is rapidly filling up -- there is a European tour coming up in two weeks and a trip to Japan early next year -- he is still too young and idealistic to have been worn down by the demands of performance: the endless traveling, the constant repetition of pieces, the interviewers asking the same questions. He speaks of music in lofty terms. "True art gives birth to good as opposed to evil. Right now we are going through a very turbulent time. The goal of musicians is to make our art, which is humane, kind and international, prevail...