Bach-Busoni, Glinka-Balakirev, Mussorgsky

Every few years a Kissin release lands on the desk with the weight of an event, and the temptation is always to review the pianist’s reputation rather than the disc actually spinning in the tray. Best resisted. This one deserves to be heard on its own terms, and those terms turn out to be more complicated than the advance buzz suggested.

The Bach-Busoni Toccata, Adagio and Fugue is the problem child here. Busoni himself called the piece majestic, rich in feeling, bold — a description that doubles as a challenge to any pianist who takes it on. Kissin’s fingers are, as ever, a marvel: the part-writing in the Adagio comes through with a clarity that would satisfy any counterpoint teacher, voices peeling apart and rejoining with almost surgical precision. But precision is not the same thing as grandeur, and grandeur is what this nineteen-minute edifice actually requires. There’s a subito forte around measure 517 that lands with a clang rather than a thunderclap, partly Kissin, partly an album that pushes the loud passages into glare rather than weight. You want the sound to open up like a cathedral door. Instead it just gets louder. The Fugue redeems things somewhat, building with real cumulative logic toward its climax, so much so that you almost forget the twelve minutes that preceded it. I suspect that is not the effect Busoni had in mind.

Turn the page to Glinka, though, and something shifts.

The Balakirev transcription of “The Lark,” Glinka’s song filtered through Balakirev’s 1864 arrangement and touched up again in 1900, is only five minutes long. It is the disc’s quiet triumph. The treble sings out with a limpidity that nothing else here quite matches, phrased with the kind of unforced tenderness that makes you wonder why Kissin doesn’t trust this register of feeling more often. No pounding, no showing off. Just song. It’s the highlight of the whole program, and it isn’t close.

Which brings us to Pictures at an Exhibition, a work that has had no shortage of distinguished visitors on London stages recently. Pletnev brought his characteristic wilfulness to the Royal Festival Hall in March 2002, all sharp elbows and sudden withdrawals; Andreas Boyde gave a more studied, architecturally patient account at the Wigmore the previous November. Kissin’s reading sits somewhere apart from both, built, deliberately I think, as a long accumulation toward the final “Great Gate of Kiev” rather than a series of vivid vignettes.

The trouble starts immediately. The opening “Promenade” goes by too briskly to register its full weight. There’s a spring in the pianist’s step where Mussorgsky wanted something heavier, more ruminative: a man walking through a gallery of a dead friend’s paintings, not skipping through a park. “Tuileries” wants wit, mischief, the prattle of children at play, and wit has never been reliably Kissin’s currency; the notes are all there, the impishness isn’t. “Il vecchio castello” fares much better, genuinely hypnotic, a slow trance of sound that hints at the more compelling things to come. “Limoges” bustles appropriately, market-day chatter rendered in quick figuration. “Catacombs” is boldly, almost starkly stated, the silences given real menace.

Then “The Hut on Fowl’s Legs” arrives, and Kissin simply cuts loose. It’s a genuinely terrifying account, visceral, unrelenting, some of the most exciting Mussorgsky playing on disc in recent memory. It rather steals the show from everything around it, including, one senses, the finale that’s supposed to be the summit.

Taken as a whole, this is a disc of remarkable parts that never quite cohere: brilliant in isolated flashes, oddly proportioned in its overall arc. Kissin remains a pianist of formidable, sometimes intimidating command. What’s less certain, on this evidence, is whether that command always serves the music’s deeper temperament. For the Mussorgsky, I’d still reach first for Richter’s live Sofia recording, all granite and fire, or Ashkenazy’s more architecturally balanced studio account. For the Glinka-Balakirev, though, five unaccountably lovely minutes, this Kissin rendition can stand with anyone’s.