Evgeny Kissin is one of the foremost pianists of today, but at the same time he remains one of the most perplexing. When he first emerged on the international stage as a teenage prodigy in the 1980s, his potential seemed limitless; here, surely, was someone destined to be one of the keyboard greats. When, that is, his musical insights had grown to match his phenomenal technique.
Across the subsequent decades, we have waited for such a growth to take place, but increasingly that has been more in hope than expectation. And hearing Kissin in recital again, for me the first time since 2014, what was immediately striking was how little his music-making has changed, how in many important ways the now fiftysomething pianist is precisely the same performer I remembered; the technique may be as dazzling as ever, but it is still combined with an unremittingly bright piano sound that is just as shallow and unvaried as before, and a musical approach that is just as barnstormingly unsubtle.
