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Monthly Archive: November 2022

Evgeny Kissin: The Salzburg Recital – Berg, Chopin, Gershwin, Khrennikov – DG

Evgeny Kissin: The Salzburg Recital – Berg, Chopin, Gershwin, Khrennikov – DG

by | Nov 12, 2022 | Classical CD Reviews

Evgeny Kissin: The Salzburg Recital – Piano Works by Berg, Chopin, Gershwin, Khrennikov (complete listing below) DG 486 2990 (2 CDs: 98:14) (7/2/22) [Distr. by Universal] *****:  The date 14 August 2021 brought forth Russian pianist Evgeny Kissin (b. 1971) to the concert stage of the Great Festival Hall in Salzburg for a recital long anticipated and well attended, a direct antidote to the Covid crisis that had denied artist and audience the mutual pleasures of their company. In what some critics termed an “idiosyncratic” program, Kissin opens with three works in disparate, national styles, by the German Alban Berg. The Russian Tikhon Khrennikov, and the American George Gershwin. Kissin begins with Alban Berg’s 1908 Piano Sonata (in B Minor), Op. 1, a one-movement work that exists as a unified whole. Some ascribe the evolution of the musical material of a basic leitmotif to Schoenberg’s “developing variation,” but Liszt might well provide the model, given his idea of “transformation of theme.” Kissin’s moderato tempo emphasizes the chromatic diversity of the piece, its whole tone scales and unstable key centers, tinged by a combination of angst, obsessive groping, and romantic yearning. Berg has compressed the exposition, development, and recapitulation into a […]