Is the Russian virtuoso really the “greatest pianist in the world”?

Evgeny Kissin plays Liszt
Brisbane Festival
QPAC, September 11 

The advertisements for Evgeny Kissin’s Australian tour scream that he is “the greatest pianist in the world”. Although this hyperbole is probably unendorsed by Kissin himself, his Australian debut at the Brisbane Festival proves he is certainly the greatest to make the trip in recent years. And by the time Kissin had tossed off his first piece, the shimmering Ricordanza from the Transcendental Etudes, you knew you were in the presence of a great tradition of piano music – a tradition that begins with Sergei Rachmaninov, runs through Sviatoslav Richter and Emil Gilels and now lives in the fingers of such prodigious virtuosi as Mikhail Pletnev, Grigory Sokolov and Kissin.

For the Liszt bicentenary, Kissin has been hawking this all-Liszt program around the world, most recently in Los Angeles. The linchpin of the concert is the B minor Sonata, which in Kissin’s hands becomes a thrilling, varied narrative. It’s a tough piece to hold together – 30 minutes of non-stop Lisztian knottiness, with moments of tenderness giving way to pure Romantic thunder. For sheer braun, only the ursine Sokolov can come close to...