Open Rehearsal: 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.