Carnegie Hall

By Harry Haskell

Evgeny Kissin was two months shy of his fourth birthday when Dmitri Shostakovich died in 1975. He was too young to remember the thousands of mourners who filed past the composer’s open coffin at the Moscow Conservatory or the elaborately choreographed funeral at which he was eulogized as “the conscience of Soviet music.” Like every serious classical musician growing up in the Soviet Union, however, Kissin studied and performed Shostakovich’s music from an early age.

“As a teenager, I played Shostakovich’s First Concerto dozens of times and made two recordings of it with the Moscow Virtuosi orchestra,” the pianist recalls. “I have also played Shostakovich’s cello and viola sonatas a number of times. At Carnegie Hall, I played his First Concerto with The Philadelphia Orchestra under Gerard Schwarz in 1992, and the Viola Sonata with Yuri Bashmet in 2011.”

Kissin could go on to mention, for example, the electrifying performance of the Scherzo from Shostakovich’s G-Minor Piano Quintet that he and the Emerson String Quartet recorded live at Carnegie Hall in 2018, but he clearly prefers to pay tribute in music rather than words.

Commemorating Shostakovich at Carnegie Hall

To mark the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death, Kissin is curating a series of three programs at Carnegie Hall this May, offering a wide-ranging and accessible introduction to Shostakovich’s music, from his rambunctious 1934 Cello Sonata to the poignantly valedictory Viola Sonata of 1975, and from intimate solo piano works to a pair of song cycles that illustrate both his penchant for biting satire and his deep affinity for Jewish culture. Sharing the stage with Kissin will be several performers who have championed Shostakovich’s works, including violinist Gidon Kremer and the Kopelman Quartet.

A Shared Musical Upbringing

Like Shostakovich, Kissin enjoyed a secure and happy childhood in the comparatively privileged world of the Soviet-era intelligentsia. Both men had loving parents who nurtured their musical gifts. But while the young Shostakovich showed more interest in building blocks than music and didn’t start piano lessons until he was nine, Kissin’s single-minded precocity was so intense that even his mother—a piano teacher—found it alarming.

“When I began to walk, every morning on waking I would run to the piano,” he writes in his 2018 Memoirs and Reflections. “And when I was two years and two months old, I myself began to play on the piano everything I heard around me.” Kissin traces his musical genes to his mother’s parents: His grandmother “sang Jewish and Russian songs with exceptional purity and musicality,” often as accompaniment to housework, while “Grandpa had a small mandolin on which he played absolutely everything by ear.”

As if reading from the same score, Shostakovich biographer Laurel E. Fay describes the composer’s father as “a devoted family man” with a “pleasant tenor voice” who “enjoyed singing popular romances and opera arias to his wife’s accompaniment.”

Enduring the Soviet Regime

Yet the paths of the two Russian musicians diverged when they reached adulthood. “Shostakovich suffered a lot from the Communist regime,” says Kissin. “Luckily, I didn’t because I belonged to a much younger generation and was only 20 years old when the Soviet Union collapsed.” Unlike the composer, who seldom traveled abroad and was alternately praised and persecuted by the Communist Party’s cultural commissars, Kissin had already built an international reputation by the time his family immigrated to New York City from Moscow in 1991.

Still, many aspects of Kissin’s formative years would have been all too familiar to Shostakovich, not least the unquestioned authority of Tikhon Khrennikov, the long- serving secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers. In the late 1940s, Khrennikov spearheaded a vicious campaign to force Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and other modernist composers to toe the Party’s conservative aesthetic line. Although relations between the two men eventually improved—by 1956 Shostakovich felt secure enough to issue a cautiously worded manifesto, asserting that “we should fear not bold creative originality, but ‘safe’ superficiality, dullness, and stereotyped work”—the bureaucrat remained his lifelong nemesis.

The Khrennikov whom Kissin came to know in the waning years of the Soviet Union was a more benign and complex figure. “One must distinguish between words and deeds, especially if one has high position in a totalitarian regime,” the pianist reasoned in a recent interview with BBC Music Magazine. “Inevitably, some people had bad relations with him, but on the whole he was loved for his generosity in using his position to help people. He particularly helped Jewish composers during Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaign. For some of them, he was literally their savior.”

A Shared Love for Jewish Culture

A shared love for Jewish culture is another transgenerational bond between Shostakovich and Kissin. The composer had a number of close Jewish friends and put his career at risk by featuring Jewish melodies in works like the Piano Trio No. 2 of 1944 and the song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry, written four years later. (Both are featured on Kissin’s May 31 program, offering a rare opportunity to hear these two Jewish-themed works side by side.) According to the composer’s son, conductor Maxim Shostakovich, his father would have preferred the song cycle’s translated Russian texts to be sung in the original Yiddish, but conditions in the Soviet Union made it ill-advised.

Kissin, who accuses Stalin of committing “ethnocide” against the Jewish people, recognizes that such bigotry didn’t magically disappear after the dictator’s death in 1953. “Russia is one of the most anti-Semitic countries in the world,” he told an interviewer in 2022. “I remember kids of my own age—and even younger—harassing me. My elder sister had the same experience. All the Russian Jews I know have had that experience. And this was not state anti-Semitism. It came from ordinary people.”

Reviving Yiddish Language and Culture

In recent years, these painful memories have propelled Kissin— who became a citizen of Israel in 2013—on a mission to revive Yiddish language and culture. “As a child,” he writes in Memoirs and Reflections, “I spent the summer... with my grandma and grandpa and heard them speak in Yiddish a lot. Since those distant days, something has remained in my soul ... and when I grew up, there arose in me a wish to learn this language properly, which I gradually did over a period of many years. Then I began, in so far as my modest powers allowed, to promote Yiddish poetry, reading in public poems in Yiddish, and even recorded ... Yiddish poetry.”

In 2019, Kissin published a collection of original poems, short stories, and translations in Yiddish. He recently embarked on a more ambitious literary project: a Yiddish-language novel set in the 1970s and revolving—perhaps not surprisingly—around a young Jewish pianist in Moscow. Kissin explains that “Shostakovich is one of the characters (in my novel he is called Dementy Shestakovsky).”

Forging Harmony from Discord

Kissin, who lives in Prague and also holds a British passport, has been harshly critical of Russia’s political leaders. He has implicitly likened Vladimir Putin to Stalin—for which Putin had him sanctioned as a foreign agent last year—and trumpeted his opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In 2022, he gave voice to his outrage in the form of a Piano Trio (he’s also an accomplished composer) that, in the words of his publisher, describes “the horrors of the battlefield, but also gives moving expression to the hope for an early peace.”

It’s no coincidence, one suspects, that Shostakovich’s bleakly sardonic Piano Trio No. 2 was written in response to another atrocity: the Nazi Holocaust that the Soviet army was instrumental in uncovering even as Shostakovich composed. Jewish themes permeate the work’s emotionally devastating finale, a grimly grotesque dance of death. No one would mistake the urgently expressive musical language of Kissin’s Trio for Shostakovich’s, and yet the two works have much in common in their kinetic energy, jarring juxtapositions, and dark, dirge-like intensity. Like Shostakovich, Kissin has a gift for forging harmony out of discord.

Photography: Kissin by Johann Sebastian Hänel / DG, Kissin in Carnegie Hall by Steve J. Sherman, Shostakovich by Roger and Renate Rössing / Deutsche Fotothek.