Evgeny Kissin, once a brilliant virtuoso, is now a superb musician. His all-Chopin recital in Davies Hall tonight was an Event with a capital E and that rhymes with mystery. How can this unsmiling, stiff, Harpo-haired, distant, awkward 28-year-old create and sustain magic like this? Stranger yet, enchanting a listener for whom a little Chopin goes a long way. Kissin's Chopin for me tonight ranks with Bernstein's Mahler and Balanchine's Stravinsky: he `opened' and glorified music for me that seldom had visceral impact before. You've got to trust the man: non-flashy, unsentimental, non-idiosyncratic, Kissin plays in a straightforward, absolutely secure manner, the piano disappearing, the music filling the hall. In the case of Davies, that's a barn of a hall to fill, not only seating 3,000, but still (even after reconstruction) with a cathedral-like shape and size. And yet, Kissin made it sound *intimate*, the hushed sound suppressing almost all of the unfortunate winter coughers. Kissin doesn't program for the Marketing Department. He plays what he wants to play. In the event, it was *all* of the Twenty-Four Preludes, Op. 28 -- not just No. 7 ("Les Sylphides") or No. 15 ("Raindrop"). It was the whole work, magnificently played, with the tiniest of pauses in-between. Michael Steinberg, always a great program annotator, outdid himself tonight explaining the point of Op. 28 (after a brief, colorful description of the scene on Majorca, with George Sand in attendance of the already very ill Chopin in 1838) -- "The idea had been to create a book of 24 pieces, on in each major and minor key. The model was Bach's `Well-Tempered Clavier,' music Chopin knew and loved deeply. "The difference in design is twofold. Bach's preludes actually function as preludes; that is, each introduces a gugue in the same key. As for the 24 keys, Bach, beginning in C major and climbing up the chromatic scale step by step, follows each piece in major with one in minor on the same keynote, i.e., C major, C minor, C-sharp major, C-sharp minor, and so on. "Chopin proceeds by fifths and follows each major key with its relative minor, i.e., C Major, A minor, G major, E minor, and so forth.' "Chopin knew exactly why he chose this design. If you play the Bach pieces in sequence, each transition is, harmonically, a step into a foreign land; in Chopin's order, the harmonic relationships are close, and it is on that closeness that he is able to build some of his most dramatic effects as moves from character to character, from mood to mood." I can't remember the last time witnessing a flawless performance on the order of Kissin's tonight, of this impossibly difficult, tricky work of great contrasts, of an incredible range of emotions, "a single instrument speaking the language of infinity" (Sand). And then, it got better. The Barcarolle in F-sharp major soared and sang, peaked and carried away. Then the Sonata No. 2, Op. 35. The last time I heard it, I wasn't particularly caught up in it; this time, I sat at the edge of my seat, totally absorbed. Kissin played the end of the first movement ("dissonances through dissonances within dissonances," Schumann complained) in such a way that it sounded something Liszt could have achieved... if only he applied himself. The Scherzo was sheer bliss, the Funeral March something I never heard before (and so it was throughout the evening, Kissin inventing the music note by note), and the Finale just plain unbelievable. Steinberg quotes Schumann's 1841 review ("it's mockery, not music") to render his own opinion which, *tonight*, I completely agree with -- "This minute-and-a-half of music is one of the Romantics' most haunting triumphs." A Chopin waltz and etude for encores, stiff, unsmiling bows, and the magician was gone. In all the years of concert-going, few matched the consistent greatness of tonight. Janos Gereben/SF [log in to unmask]