In music, as in chess, tennis, and other pursuits, child prodigies come and go. Some flame out quickly, never to be heard from again. They have their time upon the stage, displaying their precocious technique, beaming at astonished applause, then exit. There comes a point — 15, 16, 17 — at which they no longer receive credit for being young and must accept judgment by universal standards. On the wrong side of this cruel dividing line, many a prodigy is stranded.
Others, however, mature nicely and go on to distinguished careers outside of short pants. The violinist Yehudi Menuhin and the conductor Lorin Maazel are two such musicians in our times (though neither one managed to retain quite the sparkle of his youth). Mozart and Mendelssohn — the most fabled whiz kids in music history — both turned out fine.
The great child prodigy of the 1980s was Yevgeny Kissin, the pianist from the Soviet Union who made the world gasp. He appeared on the scene at age 12, with a concert at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. He performed the two concertos of Chopin and three encores (a strenuous evening for a pianist of any age). The concert was captured by RCA/Victor and shipped to every record store in creation. It was said that March 27, 1984, witnessed one of the most extraordinary concerts ever. It did, really.
He was a slight, cute, curly-headed boy wrapped in a red Young Pioneers scarf. He started with the Chopin E-minor, a staple of the Romantic repertory. The piece opens with a long orchestral introduction, which soloists battling nerves find interminable. Yevgeny must have sat coolly, calmly. He launches into the piece with controlled fury, rippling through octaves and arpeggios with shocking command. The boy does not play like a child and does not have to be evaluated as one. He is sure-footed, authoritative, ripened. What errors he commits are not the typical ones of youth (like impetuousness, sloppiness, and rushing). His hands, obviously, are tiny, and he has to break a few chords, but so does Alicia de Larrocha, the veteran Spanish pianist who stands well shy of five feet.
It is Yevgeny’s musical poise — not just his technical facility — that staggels. He is not in his teacher’s studio, either, but under the lights in one of the first public appearances of his tender career, when jitters of some sort — transmitted through the fingers — are to be expected. Yet not a hint of a jitter is evident. His technique (which is normally about all a prodigy has to offer) is deployed strictly in the service of musicianship. The rondo of the E-minor is sharply defined, idiomatic, coursing with sound. This little guy, plainly, is not a circus freak, but — to submit to a much- abused phrase — a “serious artist.”
So notice was served. Here, if everything went well, was the next in a long, storied line of Russian pianists: Sergei Rachmaninoff, the father and best; Vladimir Horowitz, who idolized him and left Russia to follow him; Emil Gilels; and Sviatoslav Richter (who died at 82 on August 2). Yevgeny was the lead cub amid lions, the talent to watch.
At 13, he recorded Prokofiev’s Third Concerto, a fiendish piece and a landmark in the Russian literature for piano and orchestra. In it, he betrays a disturbing thinness of sound and a tendency to bang, but he is, after all, 13. At 16, he recorded concertos of Haydn and Mozart, the usual fare of the juvenile. His playing is correct and tasteful, but still he is incomplete: He lacks a singing line — the ability to bring out the lyricism of a phrase — – and he plays on top of the keys, rather than into them, resulting in a brittle tone. Worse, he wants for the element of impishness, something in which a youth ought to specialize. But the final movement of the Haydn D- major is a thrilling thing, as Kissin gives it the full Russian treatment: big, loud, rhapsodic — no fortepiano politeness here.
That same year, Kissin recorded two other Russian warhorses: the Shostakovich First Concerto and the Rachmaninoff Second. The Shostakovich shows him to be a true pianist of his country: It is biting, spiky, aggressive. The Russians seem to absorb this style in the womb. The Rachmaninoff is super-hot, rapturous, as Kissin attacks the keyboard like a man (or almost-man) possessed. Again, though, he does not make an especially beautiful sound, and his performance suffers from the absence of lushness, a quality essential to Rachmaninoff.
By the time he reached 23, Kissin had all the technique a pianist can acquire. As if in celebration, he made an album of some of the most difficult pieces yet devised: the Schumann Fantasy, Op. 17, and five of the Transcendental Etudes of Liszt. He races around their most terrifying turns with glee, or, alternatively, nonchalance. The Etudes are hardly great music — Liszt wrote them for the same reason he wrote everything else, to show off his virtuosity — but even a “serious artist” should demonstrate now and then that he can ride a bicycle while standing on his head and swallowing swords.
Today, Kissin is 25 — tall, seasoned, out of his scarf — and he has just committed to disc his first Beethoven concertos. The recording has been heralded, by critics and flacks alike, as a rite of passage: Beethoven is not flashy Romantic stuff, but grown-up music at its highest, and any pianist worth his salt must address it. Beethoven’s five concertos and 32 sonatas dominate the pianistic canon. They are not technically troublesome — the 12- year-old Kissin could no doubt have handled their notes with ease — but, musically, they are paramount.
Kissin (or his management team) has chosen for recording the concertos in B- flat and E-flat. The former is known as No. 2, though it was the first written (merely published second); the latter, No. 5, is Beethoven’s final, grandest concerto, nicknamed (though not by him) the “Emperor.”
Kissin does not serve Beethoven well, particularly in the B-flat. His worst habits — foreshadowed in earlier performances — emerge glaringly. He is pugilistic and harsh, with a poor sense of legato. Notes that should be sustained are callously struck, failing to hold. He uses in the Beethoven the same methods as in, for example, the Prokofiev First (which he recorded, splendidly, at 21); but they are ruinous here. Kissin seems bent on pulverizing the music rather than expressing it. He exhibits the least attractive face of the Russian school: a percussiveness and insensitivity that rides roughshod over sonority and delicacy.
His trills are inelegant, and he accents critical notes with unbearable ugliness, as if he cannot hear himself. It is as though — to indulge in a little listening-room psychologizing — he is determined to prove that this concerto, close to Mozart as it is, is not prissy, is stormy Beethoven, the real McCoy. The opening movement ought to be playful, but, in Kissin’s hands, it is play turned violent. (On the other hand, it is refreshing to discover that modern recording techniques — which are full of softening trickery — cannot cushion everything.)
The aria-like middle movement is not so much sung as hammered. Kissin need only cock his ear to his conductor, James Levine, for an example of refinement in strength. Kissin’s rondo — one of the most delightful stretches of music conceivable — is blocky and thudding. There is, of course, nothing wrong with bold, muscular Beethoven, but Kissin offers so much rail- pounding.
His “Emperor” is far more successful. This is a larger-scaled work, and, in it, the young man’s excesses are not so bald. Nonetheless, the performance disappoints: Kissin’s trills are, again, strangely labored, for a person swimming in technique. Neither is he as exciting musically as he might be. His dynamics are unimaginative, and, when he reaches the first movement’s climax, he has little left, because he has barked stolidly throughout.
The Adagio movement has been justly described as a hymn, and Levine shapes it lovingly, but Kissin misses its angelic tranquility. The last movement — another rollicking rondo — has always posed a problem for pianists: Few get it right, playing it either stiffly or feverishly, unable to strike the necessary balance between majesty and romp. Kissin brings to it a nice fighting spirit, and Levine rouses the Philharmonia Orchestra — not one of the world’s choicest — admirably.
In the end, Kissin’s “Emperor” is creditable — leagues ahead of the B-flat, set down in the same recording sessions — but he fails to convey the poetic nobility of the work. If a pianist is not going to give a profound, contemplative, inspired performance, he had better make up for it in exuberant athleticism. But Kissin falls short even of that. Whether he will ever be a Beethoven pianist is uncertain, but he should want to be, and, given his manifest intelligence, he can be.
So, the already-legendary Yevgeny Kissin continues his march. It is not easy for a musician, growing old. Ten years ago, there was no one else like Kissin. Now, he is very much like, to name a few, Alexis Weissenberg (a cold, unmerciful string-breaker), Martha Argerich, Maurizio Pollini. He is one of the pack. An elite, rich, adulated pack, yes, but a pack nevertheless. He has grown less special — how could he not, really? — but he has crossed the Rubicon from prodigy to worthy adult, an achievement by itself. And he will live and play and grow, lucky kid, forever free of the Soviet system into which he was born.
Every successful musician was, to one degree or another, a prodigy. There are no latecomers to music — certainly not to instrumental music. (There are some exceptions among singers.) Music, in this respect, is unlike, say, writing, or painting: If you don’t have it by the time you hit double digits, you aren’t ever going to get it. Still, little Yevgeny was once-in-a- generation, once-in-three-generations. Indeed, he may have been the most impressive child prodigy of the 20th century. And impressive he remains, but it is just not the same.
Jay Nordlinger is associate editor and music critic of The Weekly Standard.
