After a warmup, Kissin gives Disney a workout

Everything, for a while, is a first at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Sunday night was the first recital. After opening galas on the three previous nights, it was also the first “normal” concert. But it wasn’t all that normal. Evgeny Kissin played.

The architectural philosophy behind Disney, with its seats circling the stage and its vivid acoustic presence, is to make concert-going feel newly communal, to make communication between performer and listener direct and personal. But the 32-year-old Russian pianist gives the impression of being in a world of his own.

There is no doubt that Kissin knows how to dazzle. His immensely enjoyable new recording of Brahms’ garrulous early Piano Sonata in F Minor thrillingly captures the spirit of youthful Romanticism. For his recital in Disney, Kissin chose another large-scale piano sonata, this one mature and transcendentally lyrical -- Schubert’s B-Flat Major Sonata.

It was a courageous, maybe potentially foolhardy, way to begin a recital. Disney Hall exposes a soloist. With the piano centered on the bare stage in front of the semicircular rows of orchestra risers, the soloist has none of the isolation afforded by a proscenium stage. And that first walk out into the auditorium surely feels, to a performer, like entering an arena.

Similarly, Schubert’s deeply personal sonata offers a recitalist no emotional place to hide. From the second that fingers touch keyboard, heavenly lyricism must float through the hall. Under ordinary circumstances, that requires a nearly superhuman form of spiritual communion. The soul is bared without so much as an upbeat of preparation. Even the Dalai Lama warms up his audiences.

Kissin dealt with this by playing of extreme introversion. He began slowly and got slower. Melodic lines were distended. He swooned over magical modulations, the swooning undoing Schubertian wonder.

In the sonata, Kissin’s American Steinway -- heard from a seat near the rear of the orchestra section -- sometimes sounded clear and clean in the transparent Disney acoustic, and sometimes -- when the pianist pedaled heavily -- it didn’t. A distinctive feature of the first movement is bass trills that seem to indicate the entering of lower depths, and Disney’s quick bass response promised to make them special. Instead, Kissin lost himself in these trills, entering some kind of personal reverie, and they barely registered.

When music livens up, Kissin loses himself too, and the more his fingers have to do, the more engaging he is. In the faster last two movements, the Schubert began to come to life. But it was only after intermission, with Liszt arrangements of four Schubert songs and two popular virtuoso works by Liszt, that this musician showed what both he and Disney can do.

As a whole, the recital was a straight arrow from Schubert’s unencumbered melodicism to the much fancier virtuoso pianism of Liszt, with the songs as transition. But what made it so peculiar was that as the music changed, as the pianist’s temperature rose from cool to white hot, as the music’s personality went from heavenly to demonic and even playful, the only notable difference in Kissin’s manner was the speed with which his fingers moved. After every work, he bobbed up and gave his peculiar mechanical bow, turning 360 degrees, his Bride of Frankenstein hair sticking straight up.

Kissin’s compelling performances of Liszt’s fanciful “Petrarch’s Sonnet No. 104” and Liszt’s fiendish (and fiendishly difficult) “Mephisto Waltz” No. 1 were feats of amazing virtuosity. With this strange pianist, laws of physics seemed overcome. The thicker and tougher the music, the warmer the playing and clearer the sound. By the end, bass notes finally rang out with such physicality that you felt as though you could reach out and touch them.

The flamboyant nature of Liszt’s music had something to do with this, of course. The more significant part, however, was the usual warming-up process, a process of not just the performers’ fingers loosening up but of his acclimatization to auditorium and audience and of the audience’s to him. Human nature is what it is, and Disney Hall, for all its virtues, is hardly going to change that.