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Yvgeny Kissin Begins Asian tour in Taipei

By Bradley Winterton
CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
Friday, Mar 31, 2006, Page 13

Tomorrow evening sees the appearance of yet another international classical superstar in Taiwan when the renowned and personable Russian pianist Yvgeny Kissin gives a solo recital in Taipei's National Concert Hall, beginning at 7.30pm.

Taipei is the first stop on an Asian tour Kissin is undertaking, playing the same program in nine different venues, six of them in Japan, between now and April 29, with three concerts in northern Europe to follow, also with the same music.

Why do artists do this? Of course for each audience it's a unique and special event. But looked at from further afield it appears as if these concerts are something in the nature of items from a production line. But they all do it. Simon Rattle and the Berlin Symphony Orchestra played an identical program through-out their Asian tour, as did Lorin Maazel and Lidia Baich on their more recent visit to the region.

Perhaps with all that traveling and settling into new hotels and performance venues, the last thing artists want to do is prepare new music. Even so, how different these events seem from the days when Sviatoslav Richter would give a concert without printed programs and without announcing beforehand, or even from the keyboard, what he was going to play. Just relish the music, he seemed to be saying, and listen to it with fresh ears. And maybe he would be playing it in a similar spirit as well.

This is not to say that Kissin isn't just as gifted a musician as Richter was. Indeed, his enthusiastic followers have proclaimed he is already one of the immortals, every bit as great a pianist as the greatest names from the past. The BBC, organizers of London's Promenade Concerts, testified that they thought so too when, in 1997, they invited him to be the first person ever to give a solo recital in that concert series, and then sold more tickets than they'd ever sold for anything else.

His recordings, too, invariably sell well, even if his advocacy on his latest CD [reviewed in Taipei Times Feb. 16 2006] of the neglected fellow Russian Nikolai Medtner (1880-1951) raised a few eyebrows. Before that was a CD of piano music for four hands (performed in this version on two pianos) by Schubert, played by Kissin and the New York Metropolitan Opera's director James Levine. (Levine is now recuperating from an on-stage fall earlier this month after conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra -- he broke no bones but did tear a rotator cuff in his right shoulder, and will be out of action until July).

So what of Kissin's Taipei program, destined to be much-repeated but which we should be hearing when it's still fresh? It consists of two Beethoven piano sonatas, numbers 3 and 26, and the four Chopin Scherzos. The sequence is cleverly constructed -- first a vivacious early sonata in the style of Mozart, then the famous Les Adieux (Farewell) sonata, followed, after an interval presumably, by four immensely showy and difficult pieces by a composer with whom Kissin has always had a considerable affinity.

Beethoven's Les Adieux sonata, interestingly, features in Alan Hollinghurst's Man-Booker Prize-winning novel The Line of Beauty (2004). There it's played at a concert given in someone's home, and Hollinghurst has this to say about it: "But for Nick, to listen to music, to great music ... well, it was a startling experience. He felt shaken and reassured all at once -- the music expressed life and explained it ... . Others were clearly touched by what they heard; it was Beethoven, after all, and the piece told a story, of departure, absence and return, which no one could fail to follow or feel."

Kissin's greatest strength has always been in the music of the Romantic composers, and Romantic music is characterized by its spirit of youthfulness. Romantic art was a new spring, just as the French Revolution before it, despite its later horrors, had been a re-birth and a fresh beginning. All the pieces being played by Kissin in his Taipei concert are evocations either of youthful high-spirits or of intense introspection, also a characteristic associated with the young. And Kissin himself, though now 34, is nothing if not an eternal adolescent, in the very best sense of that phrase.

He was born on Oct. 10, 1971 in Moscow. His father was an engineer and his mother a piano teacher. The story he himself tells is that, when still under two years old, he started singing, from his cot or playpen, the tunes his sister, ten years older, was playing on the piano. (At 11 months he had been able to repeat a fugue by Bach). He was taken at the age of six to a school for gifted children where, when the teachers heard his extraordinary improvisations on suggested topics such as "the dark forest" or "the bright sun," they immediately took him on. He studied there for 12 years, staying put with his original teacher rather than progressing, as would have been normal, to the Moscow Conservatory. He gave his official debut at 10, in Mozart's D Minor Piano Concerto.

Kissin has subsequently received a host of honors, including most recently Russia's much-prized Shostakovich Award in 2003, being elected an Honorary Member of London's Royal Academy of Music last year, and playing in the Opening Gala Concerts of both the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic orchestras for their 2005-6 seasons.

There's a useful DVD from RCA Red Seal, dating from 1999, entitled Evgeny Kissin: The Gift of Music [RCA/BMG 09026 63609-9]. The commentary is pretentious at times, but hearing Kissin talk in English about his childhood is fascinating. A word of warning is in order, however. On my copy the subtitle options are incomplete and wrongly labeled. If you opt for Chinese you get Japanese, for Japanese German, for German French, and for French and "Off" nothing. What you can't get whatever you opt for is Chinese. Considering I bought it in Taipei earlier this month, this is, to say the least, unfortunate.

Tomorrow night's concert, on the other hand, should be flawless, and in all probability a great deal more.

Performance notes:
What: Yvgeny Kissin
Where: National Concert Hall, Taipei
When: Tomorrow at 7:30pm
Tickets: Tickets cost from NY$800 to NT$3,000
Telephone: (02) 2341 9898 or (02) 3393 9908/9
Web site: Go to www.ticket.com.tw for further information

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