Boston Classical Review

At least two things become readily apparent during an Evgeny Kissin recital. First, the man’s musicianship is immense. His playing is not limited by issues of period, style, or genre. Second, he genuinely seems to enjoy what he’s doing: the big smile that eventually greets his adoring audience during bows is nothing perfunctory.

He showed off the latter many times during Tuesday night’s appearance at Symphony Hall, the Moscow-born virtuoso’s eleventh Celebrity Series stand and first since 2023. By any measure, this was a generous performance: the program booklet announced a 105-minute runtime but, thanks to a longer-than-usual intermission and three substantial encores, the event clocked in around 160. Even then, there were sighs when the pianist bade his audience a good night and the lights finally went up; such is the spell a truly great artist can cast.

There’s no question that Kissin is one of those. The evening’s lineup of works by J. S. Bach, Frédéric Chopin, and Dmitri Shostakovich celebrated as much, featuring selections with which he has long been associated and, in the case of the latter, a composer with whom he’s lately developed an extraordinary rapport.

Given Kissin’s political outspokenness—his opposition to Russia’s war in Ukraine led him to being labeled a “foreign agent” by his native country’s government in 2024—the last is, perhaps, unsurprising. Regardless, the keyboardist’s approach to his compatriot’s Piano Sonata No. 2 exhibited a measure of musical and poetic understanding that was gripping.

Completed in March 1943, the Sonata is marked, even more than usual for Shostakovich, by a tone of despair and suffering. When he finished the score, the German invasion of two years before was only starting to be decisively repelled and the composer, evacuated to the hinterlands of Kuybyshev, was depressed both by his situation and the death, a few months earlier, of his former piano teacher, Leonid Nikolayev.

Accordingly, turbulence and unease mark all three of the work’s movements. However, Shostakovich channeled his grief most potently into the central Largo.

On Tuesday, Kissin imbued this section’s desolate turns of melody and harmony with soulful, almost bluesy, intensity. The chiming, bell-like sonorities in the middle rang with tragic clarity: loss and memory—for things specific and so many more left unsaid—commingling and then disappearing into the ether.

Prefacing this was an Allegretto of almost frantic activity, its swirling runs and droll counterpoint straddling, barely, the line between madness and reason. Meantime, the finale exhibited something of a programmatic strain: its meandering introduction seemed to be trying to pick its way through the sorrow of the Largo’s aftermath. The variations that ensued, all faultlessly voiced and phrased, ran a gamut of expressive states—obsessive, mournful, furious, resigned—while never losing sight of either the movement’s architecture or its thematic anchor.

A similar marriage of heart and brain marked Kissin’s traversal of two sets of Preludes and Fugues from Shostakovich’s Opus 87 set.

In the D-flat-major installment (No. 15), the pianist brought playfulness to bear in both the peppery Prelude and the delirious, driven Fugue. The D minor’s (No. 24) opening part, on the other hand, was decisively noble and rich-textured, while the Fugue entailed a gripping sense of musical and motivic progression. Here, Kissin teased out its various lines like a spider spinning a web of sound. The peroration, which slightly echoes the finale of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, rang with opulent grandeur.

A similar symphonic quality marked parts of the pianist’s reading of Bach’s Partita No. 2 in C minor, particularly over the opening Sinfonia, which was bold and bright. Otherwise, the fascination of Tuesday’s reading came from its absorbing contrasts of character, Kissin’s outstanding command of voicings, and his account’s keen feel for the music’s dancing qualities.

Those seemed to shift by the movement. The Allemande, for instance, was a model of abstracted inwardness, while the Courante was warm and flowing. Kissin’s take on the Sarabande, shapely and ultimately hypnotic, drew more on dynamic shadings than did other sections. Afterwards, the Rondeau’s tart articulations popped and the Capriccio breathed fire, especially over its whimsical sequential patterns.

The night’s Chopin items—a pair of Nocturnes and the Scherzo No. 4—showcased another side of the pianist’s artistry.

In the C-sharp-minor Nocturne (Op. 27, no. 1), Kissin teased out the music’s plays of light, shade, dissonance, and tone color with a commanding sense of style. The A-flat-major number (Op. 32, no. 2) evinced springlike radiance and beguiling moments of inwardness, especially during its recapitulation. Though even a great performance of the E-major Scherzo like Tuesday’s can’t quite hide the work’s choppy construction, the night’s account didn’t stint on fireworks—the music’s wild filigree was captivatingly well-directed—or, in the central episode, enchanting reflection.

After the last Shostakovich fugue, the pianist offered more Bach and Chopin as encores. Though they spoiled the emotional edifice so painstakingly constructed over the prior forty minutes, it’s hard to argue with Kissin in this repertoire, especially when he gives it so willingly. In each selection—Wilhelm Kempff’s arrangement of the former’s Siciliana and the latter’s Waltz in C-sharp minor and Scherzo No. 2—his playing was comfortable, brilliant, and received with rapturous applause.

The Celebrity Series presents Tessa Lark, Joshua Roman, and Edgar Meyer playing music by J. S. Bach and Edgar Meyer at 8 p.m. on May 9^th at Sanders Theatre. celebrityseries.org

Posted in Performances

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