![]() He replied, sounding genuinely bewildered, “But what on earth will we talk about?” ![]() ![]() When we started discussing this article, I told him that I would like to plan at least three or four meetings. He had been described to me as a “moon child” - peculiar, incomprehensible, closed, impenetrable - and at our first encounter I felt that we were speaking through an unchinked wall. His bearing is shy and serious, but when inspiration is upon him he seems to fill out his own proportions, taking on a celestial air that can be affecting and, at moments, strangely beautiful. He has enormous brown eyes and pale skin, and the overall effect is somehow exaggerated, awkwardly out of proportion, gangly. It’s the sort of hair in which you could mislay something, and it’s his defining physical attribute. “How do you judge an audience?” “I feel something in the air.” “How do you decide when you are ready for a piece?” “This is always very clear to me.” “How do you decide which concerts to attend?” “I attend the ones I’m interested in.” It must have been like this to interview the early saints.Įvgeny Kissin is too tall and too thin, with an unusually large head and a mop of crazy-genius Einstein hair. “How do you choose your encores?” I asked him when we first met, in London, in the early spring, the day after a recital. Though Kissin can speak of music with intellectual clarity, he can no more verbalize how he has arrived at his way of playing the piano than the leopard can explain how he got his spots. Kant, in his seminal definition of genius, said, “If an author owes a product to his genius, he himself does not know how he came by the ideas for it nor is it in his power to devise such products at his pleasure, or by following a plan, or to communicate to others in precepts that would enable them to bring about like products.” Watching Kissin perform, one sees a man who seems, literally, possessed by his music. The forms of genius remain strange to us, and musical genius, which can blossom so suddenly in childhood, is the most mysterious of them all. (The last living titan of this older generation is the eight-one-year-old Sviatoslav Richter.) Kissin’s performances are not intellectually conceived interpretations, like those of most modern performers, but magnificent scenes of inspiration that materialize before the audience’s very eyes. Kissin has kept alive a tradition of larger-than-life virtuoso piano performance that seemed to end with the deaths of Arthur Rubinstein, Vladimir Horowitz, and, last year, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli. At the age of twenty-four, Evgeny Kissin has more than two dozen CDs in circulation, many of them best-sellers his concerts in the world’s major halls - whether in New York, Tokyo, Milan, or Buenos Aires - are generally sold out months before they take place. Photo © Evgeny Kissin.Īnna Kantor is still an indispensable adviser to the musical wunderkind of our time, clever and faithful helper to a career that has grown beyond all her early expectations. Try.’ And so it began, and ever since then we have been together.”Įvgeny Kissin and his teacher, Anna Pavlovna Kantor. He is interested in whatever is new to him. But his mother said to me, ‘Clever and faithful helper, don’t worry. I thought he would be bored, that he would lose this freshness and interest. I was afraid, because I knew I would have to teach all the basic things, the notes, how to count the pauses. And he began in the lower register of the piano, in a dark and dangerous place, and then, lighter and lighter, the birds awakening, the first rays of the sun, and finally a delightful, almost ecstatic melody. I said that we were coming into a dark forest, full of wild animals, very scary, and then step by step the sun rises, and the birds start singing. And he had such imagination, such a sense of fantasy! I asked him to translate a story into music. When he came to Liszt’s Twelfth Rhapsody, he played the octaves, which his tiny hands couldn’t reach, with both hands. I was amazed by this boy - not just by his ears, for many gifted children have such fine hearing, but by the way he used them. I took him by the hand and led him inside. “He opened his bottomless eyes, and I saw a light in him. “This mother - she had been pressured by a friend to see me - came with her little boy, with curls all over his head like an angel,” she recalls. I was afraid for this little son of mind.”Īnna Pavlovna Kantor, a renowned piano teacher at the prestigious Gnessen Music School for Gifted Children, in Moscow, was astonished when she met the prodigy. “They struggle so hard in those special schools - they lose their childhood. “I had seen how difficult that life was, and I didn’t like the education that was given to children training for big careers,” she says. Photo © Evgeny Kissin.Īt first, when Evgeny Kissin was a small child, his mother did not want him to become a musician.
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