Beethoven · Piano Concertos Nos. 2 & 5 · Evgeny Kissin

There are more recordings of the wunderkind Kissin in the big concerto repertory than some of his would-be detractors might have us believe. But, it is true, he has not rushed into things. This is his first Beethoven concerto disc and I should say straightaway that it is very fine.
One’s first impression is of the orchestra, and it is a very positive one. In the ritornello of the B flat Concerto there is a real sense of a young man excitedly setting out on some great new adventure, the playing crisp and sparkling, with Levine drawing from the Philharmonia playing that is both spirited and engaged. (First and second violins are not merely divided antiphonally; they speak to one another across the divide.) The recorded sound is admirable, too: strong and clean yet appropriately intimate.

From his own very first entry, Kissin is revealed as a Beethoven player of great articulacy, brilliance and sensitivity after the manner of such pianists as Kempff, Solomon, and Gilels. The playing is vital and fluent, the technique awesome, not least in the way Kissin is able to refine his tone and taper dynamics in the high-lying coloratura passages where Beethoven’s writing it at its most inspired and rarefied. The recitative at the end of the slow movement of the B flat Concerto is predictably beautiful: intense and otherworldly.

Kissin’s is, of course, a technique put exclusively to the service of the music. Only in the B flat Concerto’s first movement cadenza does he trade in disciplined artistry for a gaudy display of tricks of the pianist’s trade, just as Beethoven intended. Kissin also takes Beethoven at his word in the finale of the B flat Concerto: Molto allegro it says and Molto allegro it is. At first, I wondered whether he was racing off, careless of the orchestra. Happily, what starts as a race, ends as a game. The coda is a delight.

The performance of the Emperor Concerto is also very fine. If you take the view that this is essentially a symphony with piano obbligato, you may hanker after a grander kind of musical theatre than that provided by Levine. He directs with decision and accompanies superbly. He is neither a stooge nor a Grand Old Man. Kissin, too, plays with great flair and technical security. If there is a problem here it is with the articulation of the simple-seeming lyric statements where a degree of self-consciousness occasionally creeps in: where the flow is arrested and music suddenly seems to be walking on stilts. There is an element of this in the slow movement, though Kissin’s playing of the bleak, trailing 24 bar long diminuendo close is masterly, a walk into oblivion every bit as strange as, say, the closing pages of Holst’s The Planets; with the difference that, with Beethoven, reality suddenly breaks in again with life-loving exuberance. Kissin takes a rather dashing view of the finale. This is very much a young man’s view of the music, but weighty too, such is the power of his technique.

The post-war Schnabel recordings apart, there are currently no direct rivals where this coupling is concerned.'(Reviewed: Gramophone 9/1997, Richard Osborne)

CD
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No 2,Op. 19.
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No 5, 'Emperor',Op. 73.

Evgeny Kissin pf

Philharmonia Orchestra · James Levine