It’s an in poor health wind… Briefly prevented from performing in Verbier by tendonitis in his left shoulder, Evgeny Kissin all of a sudden has time on his arms and is in a temper, I’m advised, to present an interview. So I soar straight in, as a result of this can be a man who usually does his greatest to keep away from giving any interviews in any respect. What has triggered this volte-face?
I get the reply earlier than I’ve had the prospect to ask my first query, as he launches right into a diatribe, eyes blazing with fury: ‘We’re right here in Switzerland, and this morning I learn that this stunning nation has refused to deal with wounded Ukrainian troopers, citing its conventional neutrality.’
A couple of hours later it emerges that Switzerland will row again on that prohibition, however Kissin’s rage encompasses all democratic international locations which don’t put their shoulder to the wheel within the Ukraine warfare. He very a lot approves of Britain’s help for Zelensky, however thinks Britain ought to press on militarily even more durable, till Ukraine wins the warfare and Putin is defeated.
He then provides an in depth catalogue of Putin’s crimes, from turning Russia again right into a totalitarian state to his nonsensical assertion that Ukraine’s authorities is undemocratic, and to his declare that that nation is a hotbed of Nazism. ‘But for the reason that finish of the Gorbachev interval,’ says Kissin, ‘Russia has actually been teeming with fascist organisations and publications. And though the Russian felony code states that igniting ethnic, racial or spiritual hatred is punishable by regulation, nobody has been punished.’ Putin’s propaganda, he provides, ‘entails mendacity in a particular means, greatest expressed within the Russian saying that the thief shouts “cease thief” extra loudly than anyone else.’
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Kissin’s followers have a tendency to think about him as a dweller within the serene uplands of musical thought, and so they might discover this outburst of pugilism stunning, however in the middle of our three-hour dialog I come to grasp that that pugilism has at all times been there below the floor, fuelled by every part Kissin skilled in his 20 years’ residence within the Soviet Union, and by every part he’s noticed of Russia since leaving it. And for those who take a look at the library on his web site, you’ll see that he’s lengthy been a vigorous participant in European and Center Jap political debate.
‘I’ve at all times hated giving interviews,’ he tells me, ‘however now I’m going to present them, in an effort to inform as many individuals within the free world as potential of what I’ve noticed in Russia. And I’ve to say that though on no account all Russians are anti-Semites, Russia is among the most anti-Semitic international locations on this planet.’ Kissin, with many Russian associates, is emphatically no Russophobe, and this remark needs to be taken in the identical sense it could if utilized to Victorian England, the place Dickens’s Fagin was a preferred racial stereotype.
As a voracious reader of traditional Russian and European literature, Kissin quotes chapter and verse to show his level. From amongst Twentieth-century authors, he singles out Vladimir Nabokov’s assertion in his novel The Reward that the majority Russians had been prejudiced towards Jews. He quotes the Russian author Yuri Nagibin’s pronouncement: ‘If there’s one attribute which unifies Russia’s inhabitants – I don’t use the phrase “nation”, as a result of a nation with out democracy is a mere rabble – it’s anti-Semitism.’ He adduces the bloodbath of many 1000’s of Jews close to the Russian village of Zmievka, recognized and despatched to their deaths by their Russian neighbours. And he stresses the oft-forgotten undeniable fact that the Jew-hating Protocols of the elders of Zion – which strongly influenced Hitler – had been concocted not in Germany, however in Russia.
So when was Kissin first conscious of his personal stigmatisation? ‘I knew it from my earliest childhood. I felt it continuously alone pores and skin, once I was a baby. I discussed this briefly in my autobiography, however now I ought to inform some particulars. I bear in mind youngsters of my very own age – and even youthful – harassing me. I bear in mind a few of them discovering an enormous stick and saying that they might use it to make me right into a Jew kebab. I bear in mind a person in the home the place I used to be dwelling, an outdated grandfather, telling me, “You bloody Jew, simply take your self off from right here.” My elder sister had the identical expertise. All of the Russian Jews I do know have had that have. And this was not state anti-Semitism. It got here from the atypical individuals.’
So what nationality does he really feel? Witty and well-read, he mocks the banality of the query. ‘Since early childhood we Jews had been at all times being advised that we weren’t Russian. Take into account the Russian literature with which all of us grew up – you’ll discover the phrase “yid” on virtually each web page.’ Was Turgenev’s writing tainted? ‘He wrote a brief story entitled The Yid, whose plot involved an outdated Jewish spy who was promoting his stunning daughter to Russian officers.’ And Dostoevsky? Kissin fires straight again. In one of many closing scenes of Crime and Punishment, he says, the place Svidrigailov commits suicide, he does it within the presence of a Jewish soldier. ‘And never solely does Dostoevsky mock the soldier’s method of speech, his description of the person’s facial features displays probably the most contemptuous type of stereotyping: “His face wore that everlastingly peevish and woebegone look which has been sourly imprinted on all of the faces of the Jewish race with out exception.”’ OK, QED.
When Kissin does give a solution to the nationality query, it’s indirect however emphatic: ‘I at all times felt Jewish. Russian was my first language, and solely in that respect am I Russian.’
Nevertheless, in these issues Kissin is as eager to absolve as to level an accusatory finger. Tikhon Khrennikov, who was Secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers from 1948 to 1991, and who acted first as Stalin’s musical tsar, then as the federal government’s spokesman on musical style, is broadly considered having had a repressively philistine affect on Russian musical life. In 1948 he spearheaded the assaults on Prokofiev and Shostakovich amongst others, within the Zhdanov purge of unacceptable musical types. Western musicologists have demonised him.
Kissin was certainly one of this man’s protégés, and he subsequently bought to know and love him as a buddy. Although admitting that he was ‘no angel’, he regards him as unjustly maligned. ‘One should distinguish between phrases and deeds, particularly if one has a excessive place in a totalitarian regime. Inevitably, some individuals had dangerous relations with him, however on the entire he was cherished for his generosity in utilizing his place to assist individuals. I had nothing however kindness from him, and he notably helped Jewish composers throughout Stalin’s anti-Semitic marketing campaign. For a few of them he was actually their saviour.
‘It was in his home, not mine,’ he continues, ‘that I, as a teen who had grown up in an assimilated Jewish family, first heard the phrases “Kol Nidrei”, the title of the Jewish prayer. Khrennikov’s spouse used them to explain the best way a violinist was taking part in the second motion of Tchaikovsky’s Concerto. Khrennikov additionally knew these phrases, and what they meant. His spouse was Jewish, and in his household they celebrated all of the Jewish holidays.’ Then Kissin provides a clincher: ‘In contrast to in all the opposite artistic unions of the Soviet Union, not one single member of the composers’ union was killed within the purges. Khrennikov protected all his members.’
Politics have occluded the truth that Khrennikov was additionally a composer. Kissin regards him as a gifted melodist, and has translated a few of his track texts into Yiddish; he quotes composer Nino Rota as saying that if Khrennikov had arrange in Hollywood, he would have turn into a millionaire.
Final month Kissin launched a CD which represents the opening salvo in a marketing campaign to rehabilitate Khrennikov’s musical status. The Salzburg Recital (DG) features a collection of brief items, chosen by Kissin, which Khrennikov composed whereas in his twenties. Playfully dissonant and possessing a fey attraction, they may simply move for Prokofiev, and so they sit properly with Kissin’s sly Dodecaphonic Tango and the Gershwin Preludes which comply with.
However Chopin – Kissin’s nice love – occupies a lot of the brand new launch, and right here too, the present warfare obtrudes. Kissin factors out that Chopin wrote his B minor Scherzo as a response to the Russian invasion of Warsaw in 1831, and his A flat minor Polonaise to rejoice the victory of the Polish military over the Russians close to Grochów. ‘These items at the moment are very related,’ he says, ‘and for the reason that warfare began, I’ve at all times performed the A flat Polonaise as an encore.’
Then comes a revelation: ‘Many musicians hear phrases as they play, and I do too, however my texts are anti-Putin ones. When taking part in Mozart’s G minor piano quartet lately, I heard the Russian phrases for “Down with Putin” repeatedly. My Russian companions cherished that.’
On the night previous to this interview we’d seen Kissin in very unfamiliar guise, performing with the baritone Thomas Hampson in a semi-staged manufacturing of Kathrine Kressmann Taylor’s Hollywood two-hander Tackle Unknown. That is an epistolary drama between two German artwork sellers, Max (right here performed by Kissin) being in San Francisco, with Martin sending him the information from Germany because it unfolds within the mid-Thirties.
At first Martin is all for new-broom Hitler, lambasting Max for his political pessimism, till lastly even Martin can’t deny actuality. The plot has hanging parallels with the current, reflecting because it does the splitting of households and friendships: between these exterior the nation understanding the reality, whereas these inside it are brainwashed. As Kissin observes, that is the mirror-image of Ukraine and Russia right this moment, and there’s the potential for an expert manufacturing of this play in London quickly.
Kissin has written brief tales up to now, however now he’s engaged in writing a novel in Yiddish – a love story set within the Soviet Union of the Nineteen Seventies, with the male character being a younger Jewish pianist who’s finding out with Emil Gilels (a hero of Kissin’s, and likewise certainly one of Kissin’s admirers).
However the undertaking occupying most of Kissin’s thought at current is a piano trio he’s composing. ‘It’s concerning the warfare in Ukraine,’ he says defiantly. ‘A couple of years in the past, some bars of music got here to me, and I wrote them down on a bit of paper, which I saved in my pockets. Then I realised that it needs to be the start of a bit concerning the warfare.’ For violin, cello and piano, its second motion was to be premiered by Mischa Maisky and his son and daughter at Verbier, however they didn’t have time to be taught it; the finale is unfinished. Kissin talks me via his musical situation: from an ominous introduction, through bombings (a number of glissandi) to the individuals’s sufferings (which he illustrates by singing two Slavic Ukrainian folks songs) and eventually to victory. ‘I really feel I’ve to do every part I can,’ he says, ‘whether or not it’s collaborating in concert events for Ukraine, or writing music for it.’
To place it mildly, this interview has been a shock. I had anticipated a decorous dialogue of musical arcana, however as a substitute we bought Evgeny Kissin the Jewish warrior.
This options is revealed within the October 2022 challenge of BBC Music Journal.
Picture: Getty
