United States Bach, Chopin, Shostakovich: Evgeny Kissin (piano). Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall, 17.5.2025. (ES-S)
Bach – Partita No.2 in C minor, BWV826
Chopin – Nocturne No.7 in C-sharp minor, Op.27 No.1; Nocturne No.10 in A-flat major, Op.32 No.2; Scherzo No.4 in E major, Op.54
Shostakovich – Piano Sonata No.2 in B minor, Op.61; Prelude and Fugue in D-flat major, Op.87 No.15; Prelude and Fugue in D minor, Op.87 No.24
Encores:
Bach – ‘Siciliano’ in G minor from Flute Sonata in E-flat major, BWV1031
Chopin – Scherzo No.2 in B-flat minor, Op.31; Waltz No.7 in C-sharp minor, Op.64 No.2
Thirty-five years have passed since Evgeny Kissin’s debut recital at Carnegie Hall, a performance that quickly took on a near-mythic dimension and helped cement his reputation as one of the most prodigious pianists of his generation. Since then, Kissin has returned regularly to the same stage, each appearance eagerly awaited and warmly received. These solo recitals have often followed a familiar logic: anchored in core repertoire, shaped by thoughtfully constructed programs and delivered with a mixture of command and inwardness that has become his hallmark. His latest recital offered no surprises in repertoire, but it did reveal subtle connections between composers and styles – through voicing, rhythmic contour and expressive intensity – encouraging Bach, Chopin and Shostakovich to converse across centuries in unexpectedly kindred terms.
It began with Bach’s Partita No.2 in C minor, played not in the spirit of historical reconstruction but as a dramatic structure shaped by the expressive capacities of the modern piano. Kissin gave the French overture-style Sinfonia solemn weight, its cantabile middle section unfolding in long, lyrical arcs, followed by a sharply etched fugue whose rhythmic tension felt almost Beethovenian. Across the dance movements, he emphasized contrast of character over continuity of pulse: the Allemande was hushed and searching, its inward tone suggesting a northern restraint; the Courante flowed with urgency and supple momentum, lightly inflected by its French lineage; and the Sarabande, grounded and deliberate, reflected the solemnity it acquired in the French Baroque, with only distant echoes of its more sensual Spanish ancestry. In the final Capriccio, whimsical sequences gave way to bursts of energy that seemed to anticipate the fugues of Shostakovich.
Chopin, a near-constant presence in Kissin’s recitals, brought a shift in atmosphere but no diminution in intensity. The Nocturne in C-sharp minor, Op.27 No.1, emerged with luminous stillness and inward tension. Kissin traced the melodic line with long breath and restrained rubato, allowing the disquiet of the middle section to swell with urgency before subsiding into shadow. The Nocturne in A-flat major, Op.32 No.2, offered a gentler counterpart: its opening theme was tinged with a quiet sense of loneliness and regret, and later darkened by sudden gusts of drama. When the opening material returned, it seemed subtly changed – less veiled by melancholy, more like a memory gently released than a wound revisited.
In the Scherzo No.4 in E major, Kissin moved between brilliance and introspection with a tightly coiled sense of form. Though the outer sections dazzled with their leaping figuration and lightness of touch, it was the central episode in C-sharp minor – a long-arched melody shrouded in reverie – that gave the performance its emotional center. If Kissin’s Bach had emphasized architecture and shifting historical voices, his Chopin showed how much of that structural clarity and contrapuntal layering remained embedded in Romantic lyricism – and how naturally it could surface when voiced with such transparency. Even Bach’s daring chromaticism seemed to echo through the harmonic twists of the Nocturnes, rendered by Kissin with voicing that brought out their expressive depth without ever tipping into overt Romantic sentimentality.
After the intermission, the focus shifted to Shostakovich, in what was clearly intended as a personal homage on the fiftieth anniversary of the composer’s death (Kissin will also perform Shostakovich’s chamber music with distinguished colleagues later this month). The Piano Sonata No.2 in B minor, written in 1943 amid the bleakest years of the war, was dedicated to Leonid Nikolayev, the composer’s late teacher. Performed by Kissin from the score, it remains a rarely played entry in Shostakovich’s catalogue. Its three movements are marked less by development than by fragmentation, with little in the way of traditionally sustained melodic lines. Kissin’s performance reflected that haunted architecture. The opening Allegretto was taut; its restless figuration edged with unease. In the slow movement, tolling left-hand octaves supported a halting melodic line, voiced with a spareness that made each interval feel exposed. The finale unfolded as a sequence of variations, each more bare or obsessive than the last. There was no effort to soften the work’s bleakness, but neither was there a trace of theatrical despair – only a sense of private reckoning unfolding in real time.
The two Preludes and Fugues from Op.87 that followed made the connection to Bach explicit, bringing the evening full circle. Shostakovich’s cycle, composed in 1950–51 as a modern response to Das Wohltemperierte Klavier, is both an homage and a transformation: grounded in contrapuntal tradition but charged with twentieth-century harmony, rhythm, and psychology. Kissin selected No.15 in D-flat major and No.24 in D minor – among the most contrasting in the set – and seemed intent on tracing that lineage through extremes of character and color. The D-flat major Prelude was peppery and rhythmically clipped, its brittle humor enhanced by dry articulation and quicksilver pacing. The querulous Fugue darted forward with manic elegance; its dense polyphony delivered with sparkling clarity and a kind of gleeful defiance – recalling the earlier Scherzo from the Violin Concerto No.1. The D minor pair, the last in the set, offered a reversal of mood: the Prelude was spacious and somber, darkly colored and deliberate in its pacing. The Fugue emerged as a monumental structure, its weight and complexity deepened by Kissin’s broad dynamic range and careful layering of voices. It rose to a climax of implacable intensity, where grandeur gave way to bitterness. If the Sonata charted grief and disorientation, the Fugues answered with force, order, and something close to defiance.
In response to prolonged ovations, Kissin shifted to encore territory with characteristic poise. First came Bach, in the form of the ‘Siciliano’ from the E-flat major Flute Sonata (BWV1031), in Wilhelm Kempff’s transcription – played with a gentle inwardness that nodded back to the recital’s opening and quietly reestablished the voice of the first half. Two Chopin encores followed: another of the four scherzos, No.2 in B-flat minor, grand and storm-driven, dispatched with clarity and fire, and the Waltz in C-sharp minor, more reserved but still carrying a quiet undercurrent of tension. These were not random encores, but elements of a recital conceived in arch form, deliberately folding back on itself.
Edward Sava-Segal
Featured Image: Evgeny Kissin at Carnegie Hall in 2024 © Steve J. Sherman