A review of the concert on March 26, 2006 by Richard Scheinin.
Sunday in San Jose will one day sit back and say, “We saw him when.”
The 26-year-old pianist from Moscow has it all: brilliance of technique and sound, depths of feeling, and a poetic understanding that makes you wonder if he literally knows, say, Brahms. His Steinway Society recital at Le Petit Trianon was almost spookily good, confirming what his Bay Area debut four months ago at Stanford University seemed to promise: An important new player has arrived.
I know it isn’t always helpful, and even can be dangerous, to make these types of proclamations so early in a performer’s career. Only nine months have passed since Kobrin won the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition — a musical Olympics whose past winners often have vanished into obscurity.
But I doubt that will happen to Kobrin, not if the gods are benevolent and he keeps his wits about him. Sunday, as he sat at the piano, he seemed to step through a window into the world of Brahms, then Rachmaninoff, then Mozart. His playing had an absolute precision about it, a beautiful clarity that seemed to forge a connection to the truths inside the music of those composers.
If that sounds too lofty, put it like this: Kobrin knows how to tell a story. He understands tension and release, the building of dramatic narrative. His playing grips, like a great movie or short story. The fact that he has a rather reserved manner — arriving on stage, he might be a computer programmer reporting to his cubicle — adds an unexpected element.
The very first note of Brahms’ Rhapsody No. 1 in B minor, Op. 79, was noticeably well-defined: a hard, clean, vertical attack that drove the music ahead. Kobrin never pounded the instrument to generate excitement; rather, there were perfectly snapped-off phrases, two-handed runs that hungrily gobbled up notes, and then a pearly lyricism, as his hands floated over the keys.
Brahms’ seven “Fantasies,” Op. 116, were notable for so many things: the crispness of rhythm; the big, bounding chords, full of coiled power; the springing, trampoline-like rise and fall of Kobrin’s hands. The performance became a series of visits to inner and outer worlds, exquisitely ruminative or lushly heated.
The Intermezzo in E major, the fourth of the “Fantasies,” conjured, for me, a ballroom dancer, alone at midnight moving slowly across the floor. The sixth fantasy, another E major intermezzo, was endowed with a solitary majesty and stillness — and heart-choking melody. It felt as if Brahms himself were singing.
After the intermission came Rachmaninoff’s Etudes-Tableaux, Op. 39, a collection of nine “pictorial studies” that burst with virtuosic demands. The first was ghostly and gossamer, bounding through shadows. The second was ornately impressionistic, loaded with fillips and zips and crazy-rich “jazz” chords of the sort that would fascinate Art Tatum and Bill Evans.
And what a touch Kobrin has: A simple arpeggio is indelibly precise and stoked with lyricism. He may repeat a note five or six times, each time making the most minute volume adjustment. He will begin a piece with the most elusive introspections and build them into massive, tolling cathedral bells, carrying the power of a modal jazz pianist.
He can be funny, too. The sixth Rachmaninoff etude often is described as a musical retelling of the story of Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf. Kobrin’s rendition was all mischievous nibbles and gobbles.
He rightly received a standing ovation, then played two encores. Chopin’s Prelude No. 3 in G major was splendidly rippling. The Allegro movement from an unfinished Mozart sonata (K. 400) was better still. It had it all: clarity, elegance and soul.
