Describing his affinity for Yiddish verse recently, the pianist Evgeny Kissinclosed his eyes, bowed his head slightly and in a mellifluous, expressive baritone began to recite a poem from memory.
“Many people sing in the shower,” he said earlier in an interview on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. “I recite in the shower.”
Mr. Kissin, a dominant presence in music since he emerged as a teenage prodigy in the 1980s, will highlight this lesser-known talent in a concert devoted to Jewish composers on Wednesday at Carnegie Hall.
In addition to playing works by Alexander Krein, Ernest Bloch and Alexander Veprik, he will read texts by Yitzhak Leybush Peretz, whose words he recited during the interview. This year is the centennial of Peretz’s death, and Mr. Kissin, 44, has recorded some of this Yiddish writer’s poems about love and nature.
It is the fourth concert in Mr. Kissin’s Perspectives series at Carnegie this season, which comes as this still-boyish virtuoso continues his transition to midcareer master. For his fifth and final Perspectives concert next May, Mr. Kissin will play Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 2 with James Levine and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra; it will be his final appearance in the United States for at least a year after that as he takes a sabbatical.
Mr. Kissin, who holds British, Russian and Israeli citizenship, will give only a handful of concerts during his sabbatical, including one next December to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Israel Philharmonic. He will otherwise use the yearlong break to rest, travel and learn new repertory. He said that he needed some private time after an “intense” period.
A brilliant and insightful interpreter of Russian composers, Beethoven and Chopin, Mr. Kissin meshes an impressive technique with a broad coloristic palette. He is eager to delve into composers he has yet to perform publicly, like Bach and Debussy, as well as concertos by Bartok and Liszt. When he returns, he also plans to play more chamber music, performing with the Emerson String Quartet, for example.
He will travel, as he does invariably, with his mother, Emilia Kissin, a former piano teacher; his sister, Alla Kissin, a professional collaborative pianist 10 years his senior; and Anna Pavlovna Kantor, 92, the only teacher he has ever had. (His father, Igor Kissin, an engineer, died in 2012.) The four live together in the Ansonia apartment building on the Upper West Side; Ms. Kantor, who still holds court backstage at Mr. Kissin’s concerts, has been a fixture of the family since the Kissins moved from Moscow to New York in 1991, when the Soviet Union was on the brink of dissolution.
By that time, Mr. Kissin was already an established name. He gave his first solo recital at age 11 in the House of Composers in Moscow. So many attended that the organizers added seats onstage, creating an intimate ambience he said helped him perform better; since then his concerts have often included seats onstage.
He achieved international recognition with a recording of the two Chopin piano concertos at age 12 in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. He made his American debut in 1990 in concerts with the New York Philharmonic and at a recital in Carnegie Hall, where last month he became the first pianist since Vladimir Horowitz in 1979 to repeat a solo program within a single week.
When performing, Mr. Kissin, a tall man with a shock of dark hair who is more halting in conversation than he is when he recites poetry, acknowledges audiences with stiff bows and a wide smile, a gesture missing earlier in his career when an industry professional urged him: “Smile onstage once in a while. Please smile.” He also offers many encores, though he said he no longer had the stamina for his previous encore marathons. “I have already outlived Chopin, Mozart, Schubert, Pushkin, Lermontov and Keats,” he said, referring to his age.
Some musicians, like Jordi Savall and Daniel Barenboim, use music as a tool to initiate intercultural dialogue, but Mr. Kissin refuses to play in countries whose policies he says he disagrees with, including China and Cuba.
“I’m not friends with dictators,” he said. “Communist ones in particular. I lived in a Communist country for the first 20 years of my life, and that was more than enough.”
Asked later by email for his opinion on the leadership of Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s authoritarian president, Mr. Kissin skated around the issue, writing that he preferred not to discuss Russian politics for “personal reasons.” He has not performed in Russia since 2009 but is scheduled to give concerts there in 2017.
In the interview, Mr. Kissin also said that he would not perform in Turkey until its government acknowledges that the mass murder of Armenians in 1915 was a genocide.
“I personally believe that if people in such countries learn that some musicians refuse to play there because they are dismayed by what their rulers do, that will make intelligent-thinking people more aware,” he said. He hastened to add that he does “not judge or condemn colleagues who perform in totalitarian countries. — it’s a personal choice.”
Growing up in Moscow, Mr. Kissin learned Yiddish from his maternal grandparents. He had pneumonia frequently as a child and would stay in bed writing music, invariably dedicating the pieces “to my dear and beloved teacher, Anna Pavlovna Kantor.”
He recently composed a cycle of four short piano pieces that he has shown to the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, who gave him advice and encouragement. One of Mr. Kissin’s fan sites whose content he supervises, features poems of his own written in Yiddish, as well as translations of Russian works he admires that are not well known in the West. The site also features a short novel he wrote about a young composer called Venya who has an affair with a prostitute.
Asked whether he might someday perform his compositions in public, Mr. Kissin replied: “We’ll see what the future brings. I don’t want to do anything that is not worthy of people’s attention. But never say never.”
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