A Prodigy Grows Up
NORDLINGER, JAY
A Prodigy Grows Up Yevgeny Kissin at 25 By Jay Nordlinger In music, as in chess, tennis, and other pursuits, child prodigies come and go. Some flame out quickly, never to be heard from again. They...
...He is one of the pack...
...Indeed, he may have been the most impressive child prodigy of the 20th century...
...Yevgeny was the lead cub amid lions, the talent to watch...
...He was a slight, cute, curly-headed boy wrapped in a red Young Pioneers scarf...
...There are no latecomers to music— certainly not to instrumental music...
...His technique (which is normally about all a prodigy has to offer) is deployed strictly in the service of musicianship...
...This is a larger-scaled work, and, in it, the young man's excesses are not so bald...
...Still, little Yevgeny was once-in-a-generation, once-in-three-gener-ations...
...5, is Beethoven's final, grandest concerto, nicknamed (though not by him) the "Emperor...
...They have their time upon the stage, displaying their precocious technique, beaming at astonished applause, then exit...
...But the final movement of the Haydn D-major is a thrilling thing, as Kissin gives it the full Russian treatment: big, loud, rhapsodic—no fortepiano politeness here...
...Mozart and Men-delssohn—the most fabled whiz kids in music history—both turned out fine...
...The last movement—another rollicking rondo—has always posed a problem for pianists: Few get it right, playing it either stiffly or feverishly, unable to strike the necessary balance between majesty and romp...
...So notice was served...
...Kissin does not serve Beethoven well, particularly in the B-flat...
...Ten years ago, there was no one else like Kissin...
...The Adagio movement has been justly described as a hymn, and Levine shapes it lovingly, but Kissin misses its angelic tranquility...
...Others, however, mature nicely and go on to distinguished careers outside of short pants...
...And impressive he remains, but it is just not the same...
...2, though it was the first written (merely published second...
...His "Emperor" is far more successful...
...It was said that March 27, 1984, witnessed one of the most extraordinary concerts ever...
...There are some exceptions among singers...
...So, the already-legendary Yevgeny Kissin continues his march...
...Here, if everything went well, was the next in a long, storied line of Russian pianists: Sergei Rachmaninoff, the father and best...
...The former is known as No...
...He is pugilistic and harsh, with a poor sense of legato...
...It is not easy for a musician, growing old...
...The Etudes are hardly great music—Liszt wrote them for the same reason he wrote everything else, to show off his virtuosity—but even a "serious artist" should demonstrate now and then that he can ride a bicycle while standing on his head and swallowing swords...
...Emil Gilels...
...He races around their most terrifying turns with glee, or, alternatively, nonchalance...
...but they are ruinous here...
...It is Yevgeny's musical poise—not just his technical facility—that staggers...
...and must accept judgment by universal standards...
...Nonetheless, the performance disappoints: Kissin's trills are, again, strangely labored, for a person swimming in technique...
...An elite, rich, adulated pack, yes, but a pack nevertheless...
...His dynamics are unimaginative, and, when he reaches the first movement's climax, he has little left, because he has barked stolidly throughout...
...Kissin brings to it a nice fighting spirit, and Levine rouses the Philharmonia Orchestra— not one of the world's choicest— admirably...
...He exhibits the least attractive face of the Russian school: a percussiveness and insensi-tivity that rides roughshod over sonority and delicacy...
...He uses in the Beethoven the same methods as in, for example, the Prokofiev First (which he recorded, splendidly, at 21...
...Yevgeny must have sat coolly, calmly...
...Kissin's rondo—one of the most delightful stretches of music conceiv-able—is blocky and thudding...
...If a pianist is not going to give a profound, contemplative, inspired performance, he had better make up for it in exuberant athleticism...
...The piece opens with a long orchestral introduction, which soloists battling nerves find interminable...
...By the time he reached 23, Kissin had all the technique a pianist can acquire...
...He is not in his teacher's studio, either, but under the lights in one of the first public appearances of his tender career, when jitters of some sort—transmitted through the fingers—are to be expected...
...At 13, he recorded Prokofiev's Third Concerto, a fiendish piece and a landmark in the Russian literature for piano and orchestra...
...They are not technically troublesome—the 12-year-old Kissin could no doubt have handled their notes with ease—but, musically, they are paramount...
...The violinist Yehudi Menuhin and the conductor Lorin Maazel are two such musicians in our times (though neither one managed to retain quite the sparkle of his youth...
...His playing is correct and tasteful, but still he is incomplete: He lacks a singing line— the ability to bring out the lyricism of a phrase—and he plays on top of the keys, rather than into them, resulting in a brittle tone...
...He launches into the piece with controlled fury, rippling through octaves and arpeggios with shocking command...
...And he will live and play and grow, lucky kid, forever free of the Soviet system into which he was born...
...On the other hand, it is refreshing to discover that modern recording tech-niques—which are full of softening trickery—cannot cushion everything...
...His worst habits—foreshadowed in earlier performances—emerge glaringly...
...It is as though—to indulge in a little listening-room psychologizing—he is determined to prove that this concerto, close to Mozart as it is, is not prissy, is stormy Beethoven, the real McCoy...
...Vladimir Horowitz, who idolized him and left Russia to follow him...
...The boy does not play like a child and does not have to be evaluated as one...
...Music, in this respect, is unlike, say, writing, or painting: If you don't have it by the time you hit double digits, you aren't ever going to get it...
...Kissin need only cock his ear to his conductor, James Levine, for an example of refinement in strength...
...There comes a point—15, 16, 17—at which they no longer receive credit for being young Jay Nordlinger is associate editor and music critic of The Weekly Standard...
...Every successful musician was, to one degree or another, a prodigy...
...Kissin seems bent on pulverizing the music rather than expressing it...
...His trills are inelegant, and he accents critical notes with unbearable ugliness, as if he cannot hear himself...
...Whether he will ever be a Beethoven pianist is uncertain, but he should want to be, and, given his manifest intelligence, he can be...
...The recording has been heralded, by critics and flacks alike, as a rite of passage: Beethoven is not flashy Romantic stuff, but grown-up music at its highest, and any pianist worth his salt must address it...
...It did, really...
...Beethoven's five concertos and 32 sonatas dominate the pianistic canon...
...Notes that should be sustained are callously struck, failing to hold...
...Again, though, he does not make an especially beautiful sound, and his performance suffers from the absence of lushness, a quality essential to Rachmaninoff...
...Kissin (or his management team) has chosen for recording the concertos in B-flat and E-flat...
...The Russians seem to absorb this style in the womb...
...Now, he is very much like, to name a few, Alexis Weissenberg (a cold, unmerciful string-breaker), Martha Argerich, Maurizio Pollini...
...The Shostakovich shows him to be a true pianist of his country: It is biting, spiky, aggressive...
...He started with the Chopin E-minor, a staple of the Romantic repertory...
...He appeared on the scene at age 12, with a concert at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory...
...Neither is he as exciting musically as he might be...
...He has grown less special— how could he not, really?—but he has crossed the Rubicon from prodigy to worthy adult, an achievement by itself...
...In the end, Kissin's "Emperor" is creditable—leagues ahead of the B-flat, set down in the same recording sessions—but he fails to convey the poetic nobility of the work...
...The opening movement ought to be playful, but, in Kissin's hands, it is play turned violent...
...and Svi-atoslav Richter (who died at 82 on August 2...
...His hands, obviously, are tiny, and he has to break a few chords, but so does Alicia de Larrocha, the veteran Spanish pianist who stands well shy of five feet...
...This little guy, plainly, is not a circus freak, but—to submit to a much-abused phrase—a "serious artist...
...He is sure-footed, authoritative, ripened...
...17, and five of the Transcendental Etudes of Liszt...
...Today, Kissin is 25—tall, seasoned, out of his scarf—and he has just committed to disc his first Beethoven concertos...
...The great child prodigy of the 1980s was Yevgeny Kissin, the pianist from the Soviet Union who made the world gasp...
...As if in celebration, he made an album of some of the most difficult pieces yet devised: the Schumann Fantasy, Op...
...There is, of course, nothing wrong with bold, muscular Beethoven, but Kissin offers so much rail-pounding...
...Yet not a hint of a jitter is evident...
...the latter, No...
...But Kissin falls short even of that...
...At 16, he recorded concertos of Haydn and Mozart, the usual fare of the juvenile...
...Worse, he wants for the element of impishness, something in which a youth ought to specialize...
...That same year, Kissin recorded two other Russian warhorses: the Shostakovich First Concerto and the Rachmaninoff Second...
...He performed the two concertos of Chopin and three encores (a strenuous evening for a pianist of any age...
...The aria-like middle movement is not so much sung as hammered...
...In it, he betrays a disturbing thinness of sound and a tendency to bang, but he is, after all, 13...
...The rondo of the E-minor is sharply defined, idiomatic, coursing with sound...
...The Rachmaninoff is super-hot, rapturous, as Kissin attacks the keyboard like a man (or almost-man) possessed...
...What errors he commits are not the typical ones of youth (like impetu-ousness, sloppiness, and rushing...
...The concert was captured by RCA/Victor and shipped to every record store in creation...
...On the wrong side of this cruel dividing line, many a prodigy is stranded...
Vol. 3 • September 1997 • No. 2
