Chopin: The Four Ballades; Berceuse, Op. 57; Barcarolle, Op. 60; Scherzo No. 4, Op. 54

Buy this if you really want to. Kissin's G Minor Ballade is restrained, something entirely unacceptable in Chopin.

"the music would inspire a poet to write words to it," he said, ironically, considering its possible poetical inspiration as a piece of music

Would Kissin's playing inspire a poet, or is his approach to abstract, too fantastic?
The line between pianism and artistry is perilous. A performance can sound musically impressive, yet technically lacking and vice versa; the music can be too safe, too technically impressive to offer any hidden insights. Some pianists tend to distort the music, adding their own expression, their own dynamics... Kissin, unfortunately, for me, at the moment seems of this tendency, along, sometimes, with Horowitz.
Horowitz and Kissin (not all of the time) bend around with the music until it is moulded into their own labrynth, and violate the music. Chopin was said, like Schubert to have despised the thumping of virtuosos. Kissen needs to heed this advice!
Those who admire this performer, really ought to listen to the playing of Vlado Perlemuter, a real poet in sound. He mastered a whole spectrum of tonal perspective, as a means to an end, and his playing of Chopin and Ravel,like Schnabels' Schubert, at it's best was incomparable.

p.s I heard Kissen play at the Proms in London. He played Brahms 2. The performance was sickening. It's delivery was at breakneck speed, and had little if any artistic insight. To quote Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (changing the original quotation's description of the music of an English composer with performer) his perfomance,

"underneath it's trumpery of Pinchbeck Brummagem-Benares nick-nackery, oozes with glutinous commonplace."Playing" (this is not Sorabji's word, but mine) like this always reminds one of those spurious "liqueur" chocolates grandly labelled "Grand Marnier", "Maraschino", Benedictine", leading one to expect the delicious gastronomic sensations, the incomparable marquis knows so well how to excite, but which are found actually to yield a horrid sickly sugary concoction- insipid and nauseating."

This reflects Kissin's style in a microcosm.

Buy it if you wish, but beware!!

But more importantly, Kissin's use of rubato is completely unnatural. He delays nearly every phrase endlessly, and to make matters worse: it becomes awfully predictable after a while. He holds back notes (and believe me, it happens in every measure) in a completely planned and predictable way: that is, every phrase is delayed equally! Rubato is meant to create some relaxation, but because Kissin delays nearly everything in the same way, his interpretations become claustrophobic and irritating instead. Very exemplary are the last minutes of the third ballade, where the space between the first and second pulse of the measure is constantly lengthened. Exactly the same happens in the main theme of the fourth ballade, though less obviously because the melody is not so aggressive. Or take the stormy section of the second F major ballade, where the upward left hand runs are all delayed in exactly the same way. I can go on this way because there's really no end to this approach of Kissin. Simply put, he plays everything like this.

And he not only delays a whole lot of notes, he also varies their dynamics unendingly. Any kind of equal dynamics within a phrase is unknown to him. Almost every time he slows down (which he does in every measure, as said) he automatically drops down the sound level and lets it increase as soon as he speeds up again. To give just a short example: in the climax of the Barcarolle he puts the blazing melody in a tight jacket with constantly the same accelerations and slow-downs, and only loud notes when it gets faster. Kissin tries to portray 'inner fire' here, but on hearing it I just get absolutely mad at him.

With all these tactics, Kissin probably wants to show how much feeling and passion he puts into the pieces, but it completely fails: because of the meticulously planned character of his delaying style and the absolutely predictable dynamic shifts, he comes out as a stiff robot. The Ballades and the Barcarolle are almost impossible to listen to. When I try to listen seriously, I have a lot of difficulties to refrain from throwing my speakers out of the window, and this is no joke. What a difference this is with the great performances of Arrau, a pianist who DID know how to delay without ever sounding perverse. And what a difference with Richter, who used his technical equipment to push the Ballades to its musical limits. Or Ashkenazy, who makes the Ballades a very simple and poetic experience. Kissin's readings are simply perverse and idiotic. The only thing on this disc worth listening is the Berceuse, but even there I find Kissin way too controlled and predictable to make anything special of it. Anyway, it would be a very sane idea for everybody to leave this disc on the dusty store shelves. Maybe this 'pianist' will one day realise he cannot go on like this.