Ours is hardly a golden age for pianists. In fact, it is more like tin. Murray Perahia is a great pianist—with all the tools, and all the wit—but he is practically alone. The situation is better for conductors, but only slightly. Violinists, happy to say, are in decent supply. And for singers, we are in a positively glorious age—one that will be recognized as such after it has safely, and lamentably, passed.

Impoverished as we are in pianists, there are some interesting and creditable ones on the scene. At Carnegie Hall recently, three of them appeared within two weeks: Mitsuko Uchida, a Japanese pianist, long resident in Europe, who is known particularly for her Mozart; Emanuel Ax, an American, born in Poland, who is admired for his Chopin and chamber playing; and Evgeny Kissin, a former child prodigy, now twenty-nine, from Russia, who is the object of rapture and delirium everywhere.[1] Many people see him as the successor to Rachmaninoff, Horowitz, Richter, Gilels—all of the giants who built the hair-raising Russian tradition.

Mitsuko Uchida, decidedly, is not of this tradition; she is a clean, careful, and modest pianist. Uchida offered an unusual program in New York, or rather, she presented it in an unusual order: a Chopin sonata, Webern, Mozart, and, to conclude, a late Schubert sonata.

Her Chopin was the B-flat minor, the sonata that includes the famous funeral march. She did well enough with the piece, but it illustrated a curious fact about her: she does not have much technique. The reason this is curious is that pianists today, whatever their musical limitations, are supposed to have loads of technique. In the old days, we often hear, technique might have been faulty, but musicianship—in particular, musical individuality abounded. Today, continues this line, everyone has ample technique—that is taken for granted—but musicianship is wanting.

Uchida, however, has a severely limited technique, meaning that she can barely handle much of the mainstream repertory. The Chopin sonata was all but beyond her. She is exceptionally tight in the arms, which restricts her movement and deprives her of fluidity. She appears to sit too close to the keyboard, and her shoulders are hunched. Her entire piano-playing apparatus seems cramped. To be sure, she usually manages to get through difficult passages, but not without awkwardness and strain.

Her main problem in the first movement of the Chopin lay in the octaves: she could not coax a singing line out of them. It is easier, of course, to produce such a line with single notes, but Chopin demands that it be done with octaves as well. Uchida did not play those octaves into the keys, but rather on top of them, resulting in a harsh and brittle tone.

The Scherzo of the sonata, she really lacked the technique to play. She took it rather slowly, as she was wise to do, but she nonetheless missed too many notes and failed to convey those lively qualities that make the movement, after all, a scherzo.

Her approach to the funeral march was awfully strange: she pounced on every high B-flat, creating far too jarring a contrast with the rest of the melodic line. Uchida meant the movement to be stark and martial—nothing wrong with that—but it came off instead as confused. In the lyrical D-flat-major section, however, she demonstrated a superb—really a superb—pianissimo. She was astonishingly quiet, but every note was distinct. The concluding Presto movement —a ghost-like toccata—was a bit overpedaled, mushier than in the most impressive performances, but acceptable.

Anton Webern published only one mature work for piano: the Variations, Op. 27. Uchida has a fondness for the Austrian serial school—she often programs Schoenberg, too—and she makes for it a worthy champion. In the Variations, she was spare and haunting, managing the crosshand work with particular finesse. This was wonderfully delicate playing—one is tempted to say, “like Japanese porcelain,” but that would seem ethnically pointed. The effectiveness of this work is heavily dependent on rhythm, and here Uchida was in steady control.

After the Webern, an odd thing occurred: Uchida did not leave the bench, nor did she rise to acknowledge applause. Rather, she remained seated and continued with the Mozart Adagio in B minor, K. 540. If she was trying to make a musical point—and she probably was—it was clear only to her.

Uchida obviously loves the Adagio, and she played it with touching devotion. Her reputation as a Mozartean is well earned. If she had a fault, though, it was her unwillingness to let the music speak for itself. This is, after all, a fairly simple (pianistic) song, not the Requiem. She made too much of a show of it, as if to say, “See what a profound little work this adagio is?” Nevertheless, there was that appealing cleanness about her playing, and the B major at the end was radiant.

In the closing Schubert sonata, the D major, D. 850, one of Uchida’s principal defects was glaring: an absence of true dynamic range. She seems to specialize in two things: sublime pianissimos and banging. She is apparently incapable of generating a big sound without banging, and this is an ugliness that undermines the other musical effects she has achieved. One wonders, at times, whether she can hear herself. Still, this performance had its strengths. Uchida lavished tenderness on the Con moto movement, and she captured nicely the gemütlich nature of the rondo. When Uchida has the luxury of relatively undemanding music, her listeners can relax —and she is a joy.

Emanuel Ax is very much like Uchida: a solid pianist, largely unobjectionable, but often frustrating, missing the mark of greatness. The knock on Ax has always been: What is distinctive about him? When we turn on the radio, how can we tell it is he? What does he have to offer us musically? Legitimate questions all—but there are worse things to be, in our current circumstances, than a correct, inoffensive, and occasionally compelling pianist.

Ax began his New York recital with the Haydn Sonata in A-flat, Hob. XVI: 46. He immediately exhibited a pleasing, unforced tone. His is a rich and mellow sound, velvety even, though it sometimes tends toward muddle. Ax’s technique (in contrast to Uchida’s) is relaxed and supple. The Allegro was neatly ornamented, and the Adagio was astoundingly beautiful—the pianist, to his credit, got out of its way, allowing it to breathe, rather than trying to impose on it a beauty that it already owns. The Rondo could have been more finely etched—a brighter tone and crisper articulation would have been welcome—but it had the merit of being spirited.

After the Haydn, something unusual took place (as in the Uchida recital): Out walked a Carnegie Hall employee to place a music rack on the piano, and over walked Ax to a microphone at stage right (we had wondered what that instrument was for). Ax then delivered a little lecture on the next piece, John Corigliano’s Fantasia on an Ostinato. The pianist, in an engaging and amiable style, explained that the piece was based on the funeral march of Beethoven’s A-major symphony—a fact that would become perfectly plain once he sat down to play.

Ax is a faithful friend to contemporary music, but Corigliano, who was present, should have been furious. The notion that a modern work, particularly one as straightforward as Corigliano’s, cannot be played without prior explanation is insulting. If Ax had wanted to do the composer a favor, he might have memorized the piece, as he had memorized the rest of the program.

The remainder of the first half of the program was devoted to Debussy: the three pieces of Estampes and L’Isle joyeuse, a glory of Impressionism. In Pagodes, the first of the Estampes, Ax was more a Romantic than an Impressionist, and he failed to conjure that lovely haze that should fall over these pieces. Soirée dans Grenade was somewhat better, endowed with Spanish majesty. Jardins sous la pluie was dreadful—slow and plodding rather than fleet and entrancing.

As for L’Isle, it too was a mess. Not only did Ax seem technically unprepared for it, he missed the structure of the thing. His performance had no lilt to it, no magic, and the rhapsodic climax was no climax at all. The piece is next to impossible to make dull, but Ax, somehow, managed the feat.

His problems continued with Chopin’s Berceuse, which opened the second half of the recital. The trick here is to keep the lullaby going while running the busy work of the right hand around it. With Ax, however, we heard only the busy work, obtrusive and clumsy; the berceuse, or lullaby, was lost.

More successful, though—in fact, a total success—was Chopin’s Sonata in B minor (the one that follows the sonata that Uchida played). Ax’s reading of it was utterly sympathetic, and he showed noble restraint throughout. The Largo, truly, was exquisite. Ax did not quite have the technical wherewithal to bring off the Presto in lion-like fashion, but it mattered little—this was great Chopin playing, and Ax deserved his lusty bravos.

Now to Evgeny Kissin, a troublesome case. Kissin was undoubtedly—this is a large claim, but true—the outstanding child prodigy of the piano in the twentieth century. He made the world gasp when he was twelve, playing the two Chopin concertos and three encores in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. That was March 27, 1984. He was a sweet-looking, curly-headed boy in a Red Pioneers scarf, the hope of Soviet pianism. His Chopin was startlingly mature: musically astute and technically commanding. At thirteen, he made a recording of the Prokofiev Concerto No. 3: dazzling. Before he was out of his teens, he was performing and mowing down the most daunting music in the repertory, such as the Transcendental Etudes of Liszt. He was a Wunderkind if there ever was one. The only question was, when the Kind grew up, would the Wunder remain?

It has, to a degree; but Kissin is a maddeningly inconsistent pianist. He can play like a marvel, and he can play like a fool. His recording of the B-flat concerto of Beethoven, with James Levine, is all but unlistenable, so percussive and unfeeling is Kissin’s playing. This is punishment of the keyboard, not music-making. At a recital in Washington a year and a half ago, Kissin was so vulgar and histrionic as to verge on the anti-musical. His playing of Beethoven’s late A-major sonata was a travesty, almost unrecognizable as Beethoven. His Brahms Intermezzos were about 90 percent Kissin, only 10 percent Brahms. He showed himself to be willful, egocentric, and crude. If a pianist arrantly ignores the wishes of the composer (as Horowitz frequently did), he had better have the musical potency to pull it off (as, again, Horowitz did).

Kissin, it is a relief to report, was infinitely better in New York than in Washington. He began with Rachmaninoff’s Etudes-tableaux, Op. 39. If these pieces are seldom heard, it is because few pianists have the ability to execute them. Kissin has it, in spades. He is smart to perform this music: he can, therefore he should. The etudes, swimming in bravura, were made for him —or rather, they were made for Rachmaninoff, who composed chiefly to gave himself something suitable to play.

It would seem churlish to criticize a pianist so gifted, invigorating, and adored, but Kissin falls short of full satisfaction, even in the Russian repertory. The etudes require, in addition to a monster technique, the attention of a colorist. Kissin is, unfortunately, a bit of a thumper. He could not draw out the ethereal sound when needed, in the manner of—to name a few— Hofmann, Godowsky, Horowitz, Gilels, and, of course, the composer himself. Nor did the music in Kissin’s hands shimmer and gleam. Kissin, for all of his wizardry, is essentially an earthbound pianist, who rarely floats or dances or soars. Everything he touched in New York was big-conceived; there was a harmful heaviness to his playing. The B-minor etude, for example, should be elfin; instead, it wore lead shoes. So too the A-minor, which lacked impishness and bite. In the famous E-flat-minor etude—a storm of a piece—Kissin was sloppy and cloddish. Moreover, his trills were poor, as they have always been, a puzzling fact for a pianist so technically accomplished.

And here is a heretical observation: Kissin, who would seem the most exciting and swashbuckling of pianists, can be … boring. The C-minor etude is a piece of almost unbearable tension and drama; but in Kissin’s conception, it was limp and unremarkable. For the D-major etude, Kissin had all the speed and power necessary, but what was missing—this is a cavil, but not insignificant—was that sheen, a brilliance, the almost blinding quality of (to say it once more, for this comparison is inevitable) Horowitz.

After intermission, Kissin presented Scriabin’s Sonata No. 3, and here he was as convincing and musical as he has ever been. A finer account of this work can scarcely be imagined; every measure was intelligently judged. Then came a transcription of Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise—which was rather less fine. It suffered from wrongly accented notes and was altogether more lumpy than limpid. This is a piece that a pianist, obviously, must sing; otherwise, it should be left to its rightful owners, the sopranos. Last on the printed program was Balakirev’s wild and popular Islamey, a great Russian romp, an anthem of a kind. In it, Kissin was thoroughly idiomatic, and he made one’s hair stand on end—just as the doctor ordered.

Kissin is—the world is correct—a pianist of staggering talents, even if his musical choices sometimes appall. If he can shed some of his more corrosive habits, he will fulfill all of the promise of his heroic teens. And if he cannot, he will still be a pianist worth hearing—as will, for that matter, Mitsuko Uchida and Emanuel Ax. It is a pity, though, that “worth hearing” is about as high an encomium as one can bestow, in this, a dreary age for the piano.

Notes
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1. Mitsuko Uchida appeared at Carnegie Hall, New York, on November 22, 1999. Evgeny Kissin appeared on December 4. Emanuel Ax appeared on December 6. Go back to the text.