Deutsche Grammophon releases double-disc album of Evgeny Kissin’s sensational recital at last summer’s Salzburg Festival. The Salzburg Recital builds dramatic tension across a compelling programme of music by Berg, Chopin, Gershwin and Khrennikov. An adventurously idiosyncratic concert program, the first half of the recital uniting three early 20th-century composers from wholly contrary musical traditions: Austria, Russia and the United States. The second half of the recital is devoted entirely to the music of Frédéric Chopin on whom Kissin noted, “the longer I live, the more I feel that his music is closest to my heart”. After Alban Berg’s incredibly expressive Piano sonata, the rhythmic vitality and light-footedness of Gershwin’s Three Preludes for Piano with their vibes of Charleston, blues and foxtrot are standing next to the meditative nature of three of Chopin’s Impromptus and a brooding Nocturne. Kissin combined them most intriguingly with pieces of Russian composer Tikhon Khrennikov, showing the surprisingly modernist nature of his early compositions. A most memorable programme culminates in three encores containing Debussy’s “Clair de lun”, a composition of Kissin himself and one of Mendelssohn’s “Lieder ohne Worte”. Evgeny Kissin is dedicating both the concert and the album to his beloved teacher Anna Pavlovna Kantor, who passed away days before the concert: “She was my only piano teacher, and everything I am able to do on the piano I owe to her.”