Evgeny Kissin and the Berliner Philharmoniker

For Herbert von Karajan it was the last two concerts that he gave with the Philharmoniker in Berlin, while for Evgeny Kissin, it was his first: the pianist made his debut with the orchestra at the 1988 New Year’s Eve concerts playing Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto under the baton of the 80-year-old conductor. The native Russian was then just 17 years old and was considered a promising child prodigy. Following the concert, the press outdid each other in their praise: the critics were impressed by his high technical ability, his musicality and the seriousness of his performance. And they all agreed that he was already a mature artist. Just a few months later, the Berliner Philharmoniker, Herbert von Karajan and Evgeny Kissin repeated the same programme at the Salzburg Easter Festival.

Under Karajan, Abbado ...

In 1991, Evgeny Kissin made his second guest appearance with the Berliner Philharmoniker, again participating in the orchestra’s New Year's Eve programme. But by then, Karajan had died, and a new chief conductor was at the helm: Claudio Abbado, who engaged him for the piano part of Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy for piano, choir and orchestra. “What especially added to the interpretive experience here was the powerfully expansive piano part with the 20-year-old Evgeny Kissin, who beguiled not only as a pianist of symphonic or virtuosic tonal quality, but also as a sensitive accompanist of instrumental and, at the end, of vocal groups,” wrote the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. During the 1990s, Berlin audiences experienced Kissin several times with monumental concertos of the repertoire: Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, Johannes Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1 and Sergei Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3. The performance of the latter commemorated the 50th anniversary of the death of Karlrobert Kreiten, a child prodigy like Kissin, who often played this concerto and was executed in 1943 because of his critical remarks against the National Socialist regime.

... and Sir Simon Rattle

After the turn of the millennium, it took more than ten years before the pianist returned to the Berliner Philharmoniker: Sir Simon Rattle and the orchestra invited him in 2011 to be the soloist in Edvard Grieg’s piano concerto at the New Year’s Eve concerts. Kissin impressed with his thoughtful, unpretentious interpretation of the work: “With his wonderful touch, he can sing, make it sparkle ...”, as they stated in the review on rbb Kulturradio. This season, under the direction of Mariss Jansons, the artist will perform Franz Liszt’s First Piano Concerto, a work in which the composer happily blended his ideas of symphonic poetry with the concerto form, and which allows the pianist to display all the facets of his technical and musical abilities.