Last Updated: May 31, 2000
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One of five winning entries by Justin Davidson of Newsday, Melville,
N.Y. that won the criticism writing category of the 1998 ASNE Distinguished
Writing Awards.
Saturday. March 29, 1997
THE PIANIST Evgeny Kissin propelled himself stiffly onto the stage of
Avery Fisher Hall on Thursday, looking rather as if his joints needed oiling.
He dutifully bent his mouth into a labored and momentary smile, gave a
quick jerk of his torso in lieu of a bow, and then sat at the piano where,
in an instant, all his discomfort melted into power and control.
Watching the awkward young pianist plunge into music was like seeing
a seal slip into water, and in the 40 mesmerizing minutes that followed,
Kissin gave one of the most lissome and lyrical performances of Beethoven's
Piano Concerto No. 5 that I have ever heard.
Kissin has made a specialty of playing the same concerti every other
pianist does, but he is alone in his ability to make the commonplace seem
rare. There was not a trill that came off as filler or a scale run that
sounded formulaic in this performance, and he made the rhetorical flourishes
that open the concerto so intensely poetic that by the time the first theme
arrived in the orchestra, the musical argument seemed almost already complete.
In his hands, the most ephemeral details became simple, explosive devices.
The piano part in the second movement opens with two notes, four-and-a-half
octaves apart, and a grace note in between - a quiet, spacious gesture
that both expands and delimits the middle register in which the orchestra
has just presented the melody. Kissin staggered the outer two notes ever
so slightly, and bridged the gulf between them in a fluid, melodic bound,
as if the piano were a singer of infinite range and grace, and not the
brute percussion instrument it is.
Kissin flirts with excess, but never quite surrenders his virtue. Many
pianists slow down slightly at the transition to the last movement, but
he pulled back the tempo as if the music were a stone in some giant's slingshot,
so that the finale fired off with a crack. With any other pianist, it would
have seemed overdone and mannered, but Kissin carried it off.
While he was working his wonders and looking utterly humorless, the
New York Philharmonic's music director Kurt Masur seemed to be having the
time of his life, beaming at the pianist with merry pride. Masur had reason
to be jolly. The concert began with Beethoven's "Coriolanus" Overture,
and from the manly, fist-in-palm chords of the opening to the quiet, coy
pizzicatos at the end, the Philharmonic played with lucid lyricism, and,
in the concerto, matched Kissin's current, spark for spark.
As Kissin and the Philharmonic neared the concerto's coda, I felt the
same panic that comes from fingering the dwindling number of pages ENTER
N(next story), C(next context), T(total story), NT(next take) PT(prev take),
S(save), QUIT(switch databases), EXIT(terminate display) /nt the same panic
that comes from fingering the dwindling number of pages at the end of a
good book, and what I really would have liked after intermission was to
start the whole thing again, or at least preserve the experience by spending
the rest of the evening in silence.
But no: Perhaps on the theory that one good warhorse deserves another,
Masur and the Philharmonic followed Beethoven with Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherazade."
The first half's electricity still crackled through the second, powering
the suite's sea voyages, and concertmaster Glenn Dicterow played the violin
solo with dapper and exotic charm.
