MUSIC REVIEW : Yevgeny Kissin Recital: Poetry vs. Mannerism

Make no mistake. Yevgeny Kissin, the 22-year-old pianist from Moscow who returned to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Sunday for a much-cheered recital of Schumann, Schubert and Liszt, commands the touch of a poet.

Unfortunately, it isn’t always a light touch.

Kissin functions these days as the man of the hour and the flavor of the month--maybe even the year--among youthful heroes of the keyboard. Unlike so many faceless colleagues and rivals, however, he isn’t content to make 10 virtuosic fingers work like 40.

Sure, he can play loud and fast, louder and faster, maybe even loudest and fastest. He succumbs to playing in the cracks only when supreme agitation beckons. Even then, he does so pardonably, and in good historical company. Artur Rubinstein didn’t always hit the right notes either.

But Kissin’s art isn’t a matter of technical wizardry. That’s just the beginning.

He happens to be a thinker and an individualist. By nature, moreover, he would seem to be a bona fide old-fashioned romantic. That makes him something of an anachronism in the cool, impersonal light of 1994.

He takes liberties. He stalls. He lingers. He toys with a line, pulls melodies apart. He makes the music sigh, whisper and whimper. He searches out inner voices, explores subtle nuances, focuses passing harmonies. He surges forward. He makes the music roar. He flashes explosive contrasts.

Kissin is an artist who takes chances. This should not imply that he indulges in a lot of personal emoting on the piano bench. The pianist stays calm and lets the composer do the gushing.

At best, he is illuminating, exciting, poignant. At worst, he is willful. Either way, he isn’t boring.

At this stage of his already imposing and incredibly promising career, Kissin doesn’t always seem to know when to stop. He doesn’t invariably respect the precarious lines that separate invention from mannerism and definition from distortion.

Nor does he observe careful stylistic distinctions. His Schumann is extraordinarily broad in scope and disarmingly dreamy in mood. So is his Schubert. So is his Liszt. Never mind that one composer’s aesthetic was rooted in classicism, that the other dealt in gentle introspection, or that the third was a wildly uncontrolled extrovert.

Kissin was most persuasive when confronting the rambling indulgences of the wildly uncontrolled extrovert. At the end of the formal part of the program, he brought massive bravura and feverish excess to four of Liszt’s “Transcendental Etudes.” Kissin made an otherworldly journey of the chiming crescendo and decrescendo of “Harmonies du soir.” He made the snow whirl with hypnotic delirium in “Chasse-neige,” and mustered waves of wispy charm for “Feux follets.” Finally, he banged his way to oppressive grandeur, untiring and virtually unfazed, in the wild chase of the “Wilde Jagd.”

It was all too much, really, and in Lisztian context, just right.

The program had opened rather fussily, if sweetly, with Schumann’s C-major “Arabesque,” Opus 18. The same composer’s C-major “Phantasie,” Opus 17, offered more of the same, only with more exaggeration. Opening the second half of the program, Schubert’s A-minor Sonata, D. 784, seemed to get looser and looser, just as one hoped it would get tighter and tighter.

The capacity audience loved everything, demonstratively and sometimes prematurely. It was rewarded with four generous encores: Gluck’s hum-along “Melody” as transcribed by Giovanni Sgambati, a Liszt “Etude du concert” followed by yet another of his “Etudes d’execution transcendante” (No. 10 in F-minor), and, finally, Carl Tausig’s reduction of Schubert’s “Marche militaire.”