Evgeny Kissin's pianistic virtuosity is not usually associated with Schubert's subtle, demanding music, but he opened this Royal Festival Hall recital with that composer's last and most searching sonata, D960. There is no room in this piece for hollow technical display, but its challenges for the pianist are enormous, with its huge opening movement, intense slow movement and mercurial finale.
Kissin played the song-like opening theme of the first movement as a rapt meditation: extremely slowly and with tiny shadings of rubato and changes of articulation. But he performed the whole movement at this speed (including a repeat of the first section), and what started as a penetrating musical investigation quickly became a caricature of a performance. Schubert's complex structure collapsed under the weight of Kissin's overwrought interpretation. At the end of the central section of the movement, the main theme appears in the minor key, a moment that should sound as if the music is visiting a new emotional world. But Kissin's performance had no structural momentum, and the effect of this passage was obscured by his mannered phrasing and affected style. He made the slow movement sound like a funeral dirge at another slow tempo, and robbed the music of its expressive power. He released a hectic energy in the finale, but even here, this was an interpretation made through surface effect, and his playing effaced the delicate changes of harmony that Schubert uses to propel the movement.
However, Kissin's reliance on his phenomenal technique to structure his performances became an interpretative strength in a second half of shorter Liszt pieces. He compiled an effective suite from four of Liszt's expansions of Schubert songs, from the tenderness of the opening Standchen to the barn-storming virtuosity of Aufenthalt, both originally from Schubert's Schwanengesang. And his performance of Liszt's Mephisto Waltz No 1 was brilliantly conjured from the contrast between Mephisto's mocking laughter and the stillness of Faust's pastoral seduction. Kissin's performance embodied all of the images of the romantic piano virtuoso, with his body language, grimacing facial expressions and super- human command of the technical apparatus required by Liszt's music. The piano only just survived this physical onslaught, but the performance resurrected Kissin's reputation as a magician of the keyboard. His command of large-scale classical forms remains questionable, but his prowess in these bravura showpieces is still impressive.
