Evgeny Kissin

Evgeny Kissin is a Soviet, Russian, British and Israeli pianist and composer, born on 10 October 1971 in Moscow. He is a two-time Grammy Award laureate. He was born into the family of engineer Igor Borisovich Otman and piano teacher Emilia Aronovna Kisina. His older sister Alla was also a pianist, and as a small child he often played by ear or sang what she was studying.

At the age of six he entered the Gnessin music school and after graduating continued at the Gnessin Institute, now the Russian Gnessin Academy of Music. His first and only teacher was Anna Pavlovna Kantor, whose guidance remained important to him even in adulthood. He began as a child prodigy: at ten he first performed with orchestra, playing Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 20, and a year later gave his first solo recital. In 1984, at the age of twelve, he performed both Chopin piano concertos in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory.

In 1985 Kissin first toured abroad, and in 1987 he made his Western European debut at the Berlin Festival. In 1988 he performed with Herbert von Karajan at the Berlin Philharmonic's New Year concert, playing Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto. In September 1990 he made his United States debut with the New York Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta, performing Chopin's First and Second Piano Concertos, and a week later gave a solo recital at Carnegie Hall. In August 1997 he gave a solo concert at the BBC Proms in London's Royal Albert Hall, the first solo piano recital in the festival's more than 100-year history.

He has maintained an intensive international concert career in Europe, America and Asia and has performed with many of the world's leading orchestras and conductors, including Claudio Abbado, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Daniel Barenboim, Valery Gergiev, Carlo Maria Giulini, Colin Davis, James Levine, Lorin Maazel, Riccardo Muti, Andris Nelsons, Seiji Ozawa, Antonio Pappano, Mikhail Pletnev, Mstislav Rostropovich, Simon Rattle, Yevgeny Svetlanov, Vladimir Spivakov, Yuri Temirkanov, Georg Solti and Mariss Jansons. He has also appeared in song recitals with Matthias Goerne and Renee Fleming, and has presented programs combining music recitals with poetry recitation. His concerts in the 2012-13 season were dedicated to the memory of his father, who died on 30 May 2012.

As a composer, Kissin is the author of several musical works. These include a piano cycle comprising Reflection, Dodecaphonic Tango, Intermezzo and Toccata, completed in 2015; a Sonata for Cello and Piano from 2016; a String Quartet completed in 2016; and a Trio for piano, violin and cello from 2022. He said that he had felt interest in composition since childhood, and that a meeting with Arvo Part encouraged him to pursue it more seriously. In a 2023 interview he described the idea behind his 2022 Trio as an anti-war work expressing faith in Ukraine's victory.

Kissin has also become known as a man of letters: a writer, poet, reciter and translator. He gives poetry evenings in Yiddish and Russian. In 2010 a CD of contemporary Yiddish poetry in his performance was released. He has published poetry and prose in Yiddish in the New York newspaper Forverts, and his first collection of poems, stories and verse translations in Yiddish appeared in 2019, followed by a collection of stories and diaries in 2021. In 2017 he published the autobiographical book Memoirs and Reflections.

He lived his first twenty years in Moscow. After the collapse of the USSR he left the country with his parents and sister. From 1991 he lived in New York, London and Paris. He received British citizenship in 2002 and became an Israeli citizen in December 2013. Since 2016 he has lived in Prague. He has said that he has had a strong Jewish self-awareness since childhood and has published pro-Israeli materials on his fan-club website.

In public life, Kissin was among the academic musicians who in 2021 signed an appeal to the Russian authorities demanding the release of Alexei Navalny and other political prisoners. In February 2022 he condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine and later took part in charity concerts supporting Ukraine. He has argued that boycotting Russian culture is wrong, while considering performances of works glorifying Russian victory inappropriate in the current circumstances. On 19 July 2024 he was added to the Russian Ministry of Justice's register of foreign agents. Among his distinctions are two Grammy Awards, as well as international honors and honorary doctorates, and he was inducted into the Gramophone Hall of Fame.

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