MUSIC REVIEW : Kissin’s Memorable, Forceful L.A. Debut

And now, for something completely different: a keyboard phenom whose talent encompasses music as well as notes. Just turned 20, Soviet pianist Evgeny Kissin made his local debut, Saturday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, a memorable one.

Prodigies are the rule, not the exception, of concert life. One of the sad ironies of its current estate, however, is that an increasingly crowded field seems to produce pressure to conform rather than express individuality.

Not so for Kissin. He came to us on a well-hyped national tour, timed to the release of his new CD, but don’t imagine that musicality is a marketing ploy here.

Kissin plays with the natural concentration and eager volatility of someone with a lot to say and no other way to express it. He did not leave the stage between numbers and had the house lights not gone up after his fifth encore, he might be playing still.

A vast palette of touch and color was quickly evident in Kissin’s opening group of Schubert lieder as arranged by Liszt. His typically high-stepping fingers and raised wrists covered the keys with almost predatory power and precision.

His lyrical style is purely instrumental, with no pretense of aping vocal models. His textures proved beautifully controlled and appropriately variable, at all dynamic levels.

Understand, however, that there is plenty of pounding to be heard from Kissin, not just fey poetry. The resident Steinway was sorely tried at the beginning of Schubert’s “Wanderer” Fantasy, and throughout Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody” No. 12. The strength is incisively focused, in a breathtaking sort of calculated wildness.

Sometimes the fury could sound clotted, as in the initial passions of Brahms’ Opus 116. But Kissin put the weight of that set on the central Intermezzo in E, continually daring discontinuity in a wrenching distillation of Chopin-esque poignancy.

In encore he returned to Liszt adaptations, plus Chopin’s “Grand Valse Brilliante” in A-flat and Waltz in A-minor. No stylistic purist, Kissin managed to suggest that the program was the work of one composer.

But it is in just such distinctive personality and forceful interpretive integration that Kissin sounds most vital and valuable--and most unlike any of his peers.