Evgeny Kissin

The Gift of Music

Info:

Duration: 59’ 34”

Narration by Christopher Nupen

Year of production: 1998

A film with the young Russian master pianist who has taken the classical music world by storm by the time he was twenty-five. Evgeny Kissin not only has dazzling virtuosity and unmistakable star-appeal, his meteoric rise to the top of the international concert circuit has seldom been equalled. There have not been many careers in music that have climbed so high, so fast.

Evgeny Igorevich Kissin was born in Moscow on the 10th of October 1971; his father an engineer and his mother a piano teacher. He started to play the piano at the age of two, as soon as he was tall enough to reach the keyboard, as he demonstrates in the film.

It soon became clear that his gift for music was exceptional and that it reached far beyond what is generally thought of as musical precocity. So, his parents took him, at the age of six, to the Moscow Gnessin School of Music for Gifted Children. It was there that he met Anna Pavlovna Kantor who was to have a profound effect on his development. She remained his mentor from the age of six until he had achieved maturity and world-wide fame and remains a guiding friend to this day. For a pupil-teacher relationship to remain so close for so long is probably unprecedented at this level.

This was the first Prom in the 103-year history of the Promenade Concerts to be given by a solo recitalist and it attracted the biggest audience in all of those 103 years; very nearly six thousand people. A leading London manager described it as having generated more enthusiasm than any other London recital during the past fifty years.
The music is by Liszt, Gluck, Haydn, Beethoven, Kissin, Schubert and Chopin, the composer for whom Kissin feels the closest affinity.
At the end of his Albert Hall recital Evgeny Kissin played the longest succession of encores in the history of the Proms, an extraordinary and historic event which we have made into a sequel film entitled EVGENY KISSIN AT THE ROYAL ALBERT HALL: THE ENCORES. The first is a portrait film, the second a performance film with the added element of historic occasion.