When recordings by a 12-year-old pianist named Evgeny Kissin first filtered out of Moscow about 11 years ago, a chorus of piano aficionados pronounced him the kind of talent who emerges once in a century. Kissin has made good on those early reports of his prowess. At 23, he is unquestionably the world's most talked-about and sought-after pianist.
But perhaps the critical fraternity (and this writer was among the loudest) should have waited until the century's end. Hot on Kissin's heels comes another extraordinary Russian-Jewish .
prodigy -- Konstantin Lifschitz, now 18 years old. His just-released first records, made when he was 13 and 16, show a talent that is in some ways as spectacular as Kissin's, a repertory that suggests a range that Kissin has not (yet) achieved, and a degree of musical sophistication perhaps superior to Kissin's when he was Lifschitz's age.
It's ridiculous to compare great pianists as if they were race horses, but it's also almost impossible to resist doing so -- especially when the release of Lifschitz's records coincides with Kissin's latest records: an all-Chopin album (RCA Victor Red Seal 09026-62542-2) and a coupling of Prokofiev's Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 3 with Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic (Deutsche Grammophon 439 898-2).
The one reservation some critics have had about Kissin is the somewhat limited range (at least on records) of his repertory. Except for the 15-minute Prokofiev Concerto No. 1, there is little here that he has not recorded before. There is a an earlier Chopin B Minor Sonata from 1985 on a Sony video -- the same performance is available in audio-only form on several smaller labels -- and there is also a 1985 Prokofiev Concerto No. 3, which was released five years ago on RCA (60051-2-RC).
The worry about Kissin is that he may repeat the scenario that entrapped Van Cliburn, who kept performing the same repertory until he became stagnant and his talent wasted away.
But not to worry. These new performances show enormous growth, suggesting that Kissin is an artist who repeats things only to polish what is already superb into something that approaches perfection.
When this listener first encountered the then-14-year-old Kissin's performance of Chopin's B Minor Sonata, he called it among the best ever recorded. The new one, which was recorded at Carnegie Hall almost two years ago, is even better: It is a performance matched only by Vladimir Ashkenazy's first recording in 1958 (now available again on a Testament reissue), Dinu Lipatti's legendary late 1940s account (available on an EMI reissue) and Guiomar Novaes' early 1950s recording (which has been reissued on Vox).
Although the timings for the movements are nearly identical, the new Kissin Chopin B Minor shows unquestionable interpretive deepening. In the older performance, Chopin's "Allegro maestoso" marking for the first movement emerged as something closer to "Allegro molto ed apassionato."
Passion is still present in the new reading, but this time Kissin -- while not playing more slowly -- manages to invest the music with the sense of majestic pace called for by the composer. In the almost impossible-to-hold-together slow movement, Kissin now plays with a discursive freedom that still maintains the music's tenuous line. And, instead of beginning the final movement attacca, Kissin now savors the slow movement's last notes, letting the phrase hang in the air like a tattered pennant that is all that remains of a heroic, doomed effort.
Kissin's interpretations of the 12 mazurkas that fill out the disc with the sonata permit these miniatures to emerge with all their nostalgia and exoticism, and with the health and bounding rhythm that distinguish Kissin as perhaps our finest Chopinist.
In some ways, Kissin's new performance of the Prokofiev Concerto No. 3 shows even greater growth than the Chopin disc. In the past when he played composers other than Chopin, Kissin's interpretations -- however beautiful -- occasionally showed a tendency to blandness. That was certainly the case with his old Prokofiev Third performance. His playing in the new one is incisive, witty and bold.
With brilliant support from Abbado and the great Berlin orchestra, this new version challenges the best currently available. The only account of Prokofiev's First Concerto superior to Kissin's is Sviatoslav Richter's peerless 1954 version (Supraphon).
Lifschitz's three discs -- Denon CO-78907 (recorded live in Moscow in 1990), Multisonic 31 0063-2 (recorded live in Prague in 1990) and Denon CO-78908 (recorded live in Milan in 1993) -- do not contain a single performance that is as definitive as Kissin's Chopin B Minor Sonata. But everything is dazzling, and his range over three centuries of music -- from Bach's French Overture in B Minor to Ravel's "Gaspard de la Nuit" -- would be intimidating even in a much older pianist.
Unlike Kissin's Mozart playing, which is undistinguished, the 16-year-old Lifschitz gives us a performance of Mozart's elusive Rondo in A Minor that is penetrating and subtle. In the huge and challenging Bach work, Lifschitz's intriguing voicing and sense of drama recalls -- albeit in a more full-toned manner -- the playing of the young Glenn Gould.
Most pianists slam-dunk Beethoven's C Minor Variations. But Lifschitz does not play it like a grand etude, preferring a treatment that is free and imaginative and yet manages to preserve its sense of proportion. Schumann's "Papillons" (on the first Denon disc) and "Fantasiestuecke" (Multisonic) show an interpreter who is able (as Kissin, in his more measured Schumann performances, is not) to capture the composer's mercurial instability and flights of fancy.
The "Gaspard de la Nuit" may be the most imaginative and provocative performance since Alexander Toradze's extraordinary EMI version a few years back. Unlike almost any other young pianist known to this writer, the 16-year-old Lifschitz is less interested in the work's razzle-dazzle prestidigitation than its alternately seductive and menacing atmosphere.
Like Toradze, Lifschitz breaks free of the influence of the two traditional exemplars in this piece -- the shimmering version of Walter Gieseking or the quirkily explosive one of Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli. In "Le Gibet" and "Scarbo," for example, the pianist takes fearlessly expansive tempos that enable him to reveal details in a dreamscape that remains terra incognita to most of his colleagues.
Lifschitz's Chopin is also mightily impressive, though it does not achieve the heights Kissin scaled at a comparably precocious age. In the great F-sharp Minor Polonaise, he takes a broad tempo similar to Kissin's. But while there are original details, such as a sustained crescendo early in the piece that treats Chopin's dynamic marking in a somewhat cavalier manner, the 16-year-old pianist's performance does not exhibit the extraordinary tensile strength that Kissin's did at the age of 14.
There is much talk nowadays about how Russia's current economic woes have sounded the death knell of the musical system that produced the world-dominant Russian piano school. That Kissin now lives in New York, and that Lifschitz is about to move from Moscow to London, are facts that speak for themselves.
But if Russian piano playing is like a dying comet, its last pass through the skies -- as represented by these two stellar young pianists -- is a gloriously bright finale.