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Piano Wizard пишет:
Evgeny Kissin (b. 1971)
He certainly is one of today's best-selling classical musicians. People are crazy about him, and many expect that he will be among the 21st century's greatest pianists. I also had a similar expectation some 7 to 8 years ago, but I don't any more. A survey of his recordings will explain why.
Evgeny Kissin shocked the world when he played both Chopin concertos in Moscow at age 12, in March 1984. The recording of that sensational concert shows that the little boy was already equipped with a big technique that could meet all the demands in these technically tricky works (let me tell you, in terms of playing all the notes accurately, they are more difficult than the Tchaikovsky 1st!). His little fingers were not strong enough for some of the more powerful places, and he was too young to fully understand the music's profound feeling, but the youthfulness in his playing, which is particularly suitable for the third movements, is something we can rarely hear, one of the reasons being we rarely hear these concertos played by someone so young!
Six years and a half had elapsed when the 18-year-old pianist made his Carnegie Hall debut in September 1990. The recording of the recital contains some of the most fabulous piano playing one can ever hear. The Schumann Abegg Variations are absolutely fantastic. Kissin was very musical. He played with extraordinary drive, and the glittering articulation in single-note passages is phenomenal. The Symphonic Etudes are one of the best versions I have ever heard. His dynamic treatment is almost magical. He was very successful in making the repetitive last variation sound non-repetitive. The Liszt Rhapsodie espagnole and Transcendental Etude No.10 are also very good. I am most impressed by his technical security and the purity of his sound. Too bad I only have the highlights CD of the whole recital. This recital shows how far he had gone since his 1984 concert. It seemed that he was making good progress and would quickly develop into a top-notch pianist. However, the many CDs that followed kept bringing disappointments.
Shortly after the Carnegie debut, he made a series of recordings for Deutsche Grammophon in Dec 1990 which are now on a mid-priced Masters Series CD. The Schubert Wanderer Fantasie has an admirable directness and youthfulness, but I like performances that are more virtuosic. The Schubert/Liszt Lieder show that he had matured considerably since 1984, though I think the singing line is too calm in quiet sections. The Brahms Fantasien Op.116, however, sounds uncomfortable. The Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No.12 is an attempt to emphasize the music's depth, but I am disappointed by its lack of electricity. Nevertheless, he could often impress with his stupendous technique, for example at 8:30 to 8:38 of the Rhapsody, the clarity and evenness of the fast right-hand notes are something few pianists can do (for example, compare with Bolet in his London/Decca recording). The Schumann Concerto disc on Sony (rec. May and Oct 1992) is only so-so. He really should have avoided the Schubert/Liszt Valse caprice No.6; anyone who has heard Horowitz's miraculous performance in Moscow will find Kissin's rendition very hard to sit through. Still, the CD contains a technically stunning Schubert/Liszt Erlkonig. If I were to play those repeated octaves so fast, my hands would go sour within 3 seconds! The Chopin pieces recorded for RCA in Feb 1993 were played carefully and with a thick sound, and often with too much pedaling (for instance, he used the pedal a great deal in the 5th Polonaise to try to create certain tonal effects, but to me the result is a big mess). One can clearly hear his effort to sound mature, but it results in an almost unbearable boredom. He failed to maintain the listener's interest when he played soft. The Scherzo No.2 is the only piece on the whole disc that is worth listening to more than once. An even worse CD followed. It was his Jan 1993 recording of the Rach 3 with Ozawa/Boston Sym. It would be hard to make this great concerto sound more boring! The only nice thing about the recording is that he chose to play the extremely difficult ossia passage in the third movement, between 8:42 and 8:48. I haven't heard that elsewhere. Then came the Schumann-and-Liszt CD recorded in Aug 1995. The Schumann Fantasy is far less impressive than the two Schumann works he played at the Carnegie debut, but the five Liszt Transcendental Etudes are pretty good. The Chasse-neige (No.12) is unusually dynamic, the Feux follets (No.5) is hair-raising, and the Wilde Jagd (No .8th) is almost as fast as Lazar Berman's recording! With James Levine, he recorded Beethoven's 2nd and 5th concertos in Jan 1997. Neither the soloist nor the conductor sounds enthusiastic. In fact, I think both of them did a lousy job. There is more bad Beethoven playing on his Aug 1997 RCA CD, which has a Moonlight Sonata that is perfunctorily played. The first movement is stiff, and in the third movement he shows only amazing fingerwork but little understanding of the music. The Franck Prelude, Choral et Fugue lacks the beauty the piece is supposed to have. The Paganini Variations by Brahms are a mixture of great and ugly playing. The variations which he played briskly and simplistically tend to be much better than those where he played slow and pretended to be expressive. For example, variations V and IX in Book I and variations II, IX, XII, and XIII in Book II were played with the utmost ugliness and exaggeration. It sounds as though he was making disgusting faces a la Uchida! In his more recent release, that of the 4 Chopin Ballades (rec. Aug 1998), he again tried to impress by using a damn lot of feeling, but most of this "feeling" is fake and affected, and it impedes the flow of the music. The rubato and numerous pauses he used are horrible and irritating. To be honest, it is even worse than Arrau's worst Chopin recordings. Pollini must have been pleased to see his competitor releasing such an inferior account of the ballades shortly before his own was issued by DG. However, he redeemed himself a little bit in his more recent discs, e.g. the Chopin's Preludes and the Mussorgsky Pictures, where he uses a more straightforward approach, avoiding a disgusting pretension of having "deep feeling".
In my opinion, Kissin's artistic development is going in the wrong direction. He undoubtedly has a highly polished technique, but artistically, he has been trying to do things that he is actually not yet ready to do. Using a lot of rubato, slowing down the tempo in order to sound profound, playing with big volume changes....he is doing all these more and more frequently, with the hope that people will think he is doing well in his musical maturation process. But he is doing these things improperly, because his playing is not supported by a real understanding of the music. His best CDs remain his early ones (people say his disc of the Rach 2 and Etude-tableaux made at age 16 is also excellent, but I haven't heard the CD), and since the early 90s his playing has been going downhill. I hope he isn't going to be another Van Cliburn, achieving a status as a world-class pianist very early in his career, but unable to sustain it for very long.
:!: По-моему, тут есть доля правды.