Kissin Brings Satisfying Shostakovich to Davies

2021 photograph of Evgeny Kissin (by Gkobe, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, from Wikimedia Commons)

The second half of last night’s solo piano recital program by Evgeny Kissin for the Great Performers Series in Davies Symphony Hall was devoted entirely to Dmitry Shostakovich. He began with the composer’s second piano sonata, Opus 61 in B minor, composed in 1943 during World War II. This was followed by two of the prelude-fugue couplings from his Opus 87 collection accounting for all major and minor keys. Kissin’s selections were in D-flat major (Number 15) and D minor (Number 24).

His last visit to Davies was a little less than a year ago. On that occasion, his “Russian selection” was Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 14, the second piano sonata in D minor. Personally, I was glad to see Shostakovich get more attention, particularly as a reflection on the selections by Johann Sebastian Bach and Frédéric Chopin that began the program. Kissin displayed a firm and confident command of the many technical challenges in Opus 61, but he always also found the right dispositions of expressiveness behind those challenges. I must confess, however, that I have a particular fondness for the D-flat major prelude, which not only presents Shostakovich at his most prankish but even suggests influence from the English Christmas carol “We Wish You a Merry Christmas!”

Sadly, where expressiveness was concerned, neither Bach nor Chopin received much attention during the first half of the program. Bach’s BWV 826 partita in C minor includes three dance movements (Allemande, Courante, and Sarabande); and it was clear that Kissin cared little about any sense of choreographic rhetoric. Taken as a whole, it seems as if he just wanted to deliver a massive collection of notes with little attention to how those notes grouped into shapes or how those shapes conveyed any expressiveness.

Chopin was represented with three selections. The first two were nocturnes: the first from Opus 27 in C-sharp minor and the second from Opus 32 in A-flat major. There was as little sense of expression in either of Kissin’s accounts as there had been in his approach to Bach. He then wrapped up the set with Opus 54, the fourth scherzo, composed in the key of E major. This was all banging and no coherence. If there was any sense of expression at all, it was buried in the rubble.

Kissin took three encores, none of which were announced. The first was more Bach, which, unless I am mistaken, was an arrangement of a Sinfonia from one of the cantatas. (Which one, I cannot say!) This was followed by two more Chopin offerings. I cannot account for the first, but the second awakened fond memories of a ballet by James Waring in which the dancers played Pat-a-cake. This was the second of the Opus 64 waltzes in the key of C-sharp minor.

That account was engaging enough for me to leave Davies with a positive disposition!