This may well be Kissin’s finest record to date; an audacious claim when you consider his previous offerings. At the ripe old age of 27 he plays Chopin – most widely performed yet most elusive of keyboard poets – with a rhetorical drama, intensity and power that few could equal, an astonishing achievement shining like a beacon of light in our often beleaguered age of debased musical values and currency. His technique is of an obliterating command, enough to make even his strongest competitors throw up their hands in despair, and yet everything is at the service of a deeply ardent and poetic nature. Listen to his slow and pensive Andantino in the Second Ballade, its rhythm or thought-pattern constantly halted and checked (this is an entirely modern reading, pondered in a manner light years away from, say, Cortot’s careless rapture or Moiseiwitsch’s silken nonchalance), the following presto storms of such pulverizing force that they will make even the least susceptible hackles rise and fists clench as Jove’s thunder roars across the universe.
The first subject of the First Ballade is daringly slow and inward-looking, the start of the glorious Fourth evoking, as JOC so beautifully put it, the feelings of a blind man when first granted the gift of sight, while the Berceuse is seen through an opalescent pedal haze that creates its own hallucinatory and rarified atmosphere. The final page of the Barcarolle – always among music’s most magical homecomings – is given with an imaginative brio known to very few, and the Fourth Scherzo is among the most Puckish and highly coloured on record. The recordings are less than ideally beautiful but more than adequate, and comparison in the Ballades, even with artists of the calibre of Zimerman and Perahia, is more irrelevant than odious.'