The second instalment of “Kissin and Friends” at Carnegie Hall reaffirmed Evgeny Kissin’s deep engagement with Shostakovich’s chamber music as both an intimate and morally charged realm. Whereas the first evening focused on sonatas for piano and strings, this programme brought together a larger group of distinguished collaborators to explore vocal and instrumental works, offering a gripping sequence of emotional extremes – from mockery to grief, from coded satire to folk inflections.
The better-known pieces occupied the center of the programmatic arch. The Piano Quintet in G minor revealed Shostakovich’s neoclassical impulse refracted through the composer’s lifelong negotiation between inner tension and outward conformity. The Prelude and Fugue, at once austere and probing, received a performance of clarity and restraint, with Kissin and the Kopelman Quartet – like Gideon Kremer, a living link to the Shostakovich tradition – maintaining a taut architecture without softening its severity. The Scherzo’s grotesque vigour – its stamping rhythms and brittle edges – was dispatched with biting precision and vehemence. By contrast, the Intermezzo brought a moment of inwardness, shaped in long lines by Mikhail Kopelman’s violin and played with restraint, never indulgent. The Finale, which can sometimes feel like an understated afterthought, instead came across as an uneasy release, more ironic epilogue than resolution.
An elusive catharsis also marked the rendition of Shostakovich’s Second Piano Trio, a dance of death pushed to its bitter edge, ending not in closure but in exhaustion. From the spectral cello harmonics of the opening to the grotesque propulsion of the Scherzo and the austere dignity of the Largo – with the piano’s bell-like tolling, measured and hollow – the performance traced a path of harrowing intensity. Kremer’s tremulous tone and Dirvanauskaitė’s anchored lyricism framed Kissin’s pianism – angular, unsparing and charged with inner volatility.
The Jewish thematic thread, implicit in the strained dance rhythms and modal inflections of the Trio finale, emerged fully and explicitly in From Jewish Folk Poetry. Written in 1948 but long withheld from public performance, the cycle sets Russian translations of Yiddish verse to music that veers between irony, sorrow and perseverance. The three singers – Susanna Phillips, Sasha Cooke and John Matthew Myers – formed a well-balanced trio and engaged thoughtfully with the cycle’s tonal ambiguity. Yet the delivery occasionally felt non-idiomatic and insufficiently restrained in emotional contour. Kissin, never relegated to accompaniment, shaped the piano writing with expressive breadth, from brittle ostinati to consoling cantabile. The concluding song, Happiness, was delivered with just enough forced optimism to suggest that this so-called joy might carry a grim footnote.
Another song cycle, Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin – one of Shostakovich’s final works, based on verses by the deranged Captain Lebyadkin in Dostoevsky’s Demons – opened the evening. Assembling a patchwork of grotesque, parodic and unsettling monologues, it calls to mind the drunken priest from The Nose, a figure Shostakovich had imagined almost four decades earlier. Bass Alexander Roslavets delivered the role with tremendous stage presence, impressive vocal command and a flair for psychological ambiguity; booming proclamations gave way to murmured non sequiturs, lurching between comedy and menace. Kissin navigated the jagged piano part with incisive rhythm and theatrical timing, articulating its sudden silences and grotesque flourishes with the kind of dry exactitude the music demands. As an opener, the cycle offered no easy foothold, just a disorienting pivot into Shostakovich’s late style, where irony becomes a form of mourning.
Kissin, increasingly distant from the flash of youthful virtuosity, revealed not just his mastery at the keyboard but a deep curatorial instinct, assembling a performance less a commemorative gesture than a shared exploration of fractured voices: private, ironic and haunted.
