Evgeny Kissin: one concert, three concertos

Programme

Perhaps the most gifted classical pianist of our time, Evgeny Kissin plays not one but three rarely-performed jewels of the piano concerto repertoire.  

Admired – even venerated – as the heir of the great Russian piano tradition, Kissin has an impressive list of awards, firsts and ‘youngest-evers’ to his name, including a Grammy for his recording of Prokofiev piano concertos with the Philharmonia.  

His extraordinary programme brings together three bold, brilliant and distinctive piano concertos. Rimsky-Korsakov’s and Prokofiev’s are both single-movement works around 15 minutes long. Rimsky-Korsakov acknowledged his debt to Liszt for his concerto’s lyricism and virtuosity, but gave it a marked Russian flavour by using a Russian folk song as its main theme.  

Prokofiev’s concerto, like its composer, is bright and daring. He chose to perform it in a competition at the St Petersburg Conservatory, reasoning that the jury “simply would not be able to judge whether I was playing it well or not”. His chutzpah paid off, and he won the competition – his prize was a grand piano.  

Scriabin said that he wrote the piano part of his concerto in just a week. Yearning and poetic, it follows in the footsteps of Chopin, but points firmly in the direction of Scriabin’s journey into radical, almost mystical individuality.  

This concert is generously supported by Sir Sydney Lipworth KC and Lady Lipworth CBE