Herbert von Karajan and Evgeny Kissin at the 1988 New Year’s Eve Concert
In 1988, Evgeny Kissin made his debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker in the last New Year’s Eve Concert under the direction of Herbert von Karajan. The now legendary performance of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto was broadcast internationally on television and made Kissin a household name. Looking back, Kissin said, “The fact that Karajan of all people described me as a young genius was a great honour for me”. The orchestra and chief conductor completed the programme with a performance of Prokofiev’s Symphonie classique.
There was something very special in the air when Evgeny Kissin took his seat at the piano for the first time in front of the Berliner Philharmoniker. Herbert von Karajan had invited the then 17-year-old to audition and spontaneously engaged him for the prestigious New Year’s Eve Concert. The programme featured Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, which the composer himself had once described as one of his “favourite children” and at the same time “unusually difficult”.
Kissin said of their performance and Karajan’s conspicuously slow reading: “He simply didn’t like the way this concerto had been performed in the past – too fast, too hasty, he thought – and so the result was these extremely slow tempi. I think this approach probably reflected his age at the time. He was already over 80 and was perhaps looking for the other extreme. But with no other conductor was I able to create something so new. This Tchaikovsky was unusual, it took some getting used to, but it was still very exciting. Karajan was still able to fill this music with every fibre of his personality at that time.”
Before the interval, Karajan conducted the Symphonie classique, which Sergei Prokofiev said he wanted to write “like Haydn or Mozart if they had lived in the 20th century”. However, the effervescent music only indulges in the Classical sound in the form of a staged masquerade, which is repeatedly countered by surprising harmonic shifts.
Berliner Philharmoniker
Herbert von Karajan
Evgeny Kissin
© 1988 Sony
Category
Artists
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