Cute puppies sell anything...

I have nothing against cute boys and girls exploiting the advantages of their phenotype, be it in modeling or in soliciting sugar daddies on Craigslist.  But when it comes to serious music, I would expect a musician's success to be based on more artistically relevant factors than just 'cute puppy' looks.  Which, of course, makes me a hopeless imbecile - a depressing self-assessment, true, but amply justified by the meteoric career trajectory of the Canadian-born, still very young,  and singularly mediocre pianist Jan Lisiecki (b. 1995).

My first encounter with Lisiecki was through a live recording from the 2010 Music Mountain Festival (Connecticut, USA) where he played the chamber version of Chopin's F-minor piano concerto with the Penderecki String Quartet.  It took me about three minutes of listening to the solo part to become convinced that, as a 15-year old, Lisiecki had already mastered a thoroughly generic piano tone and a perfectly wooden way of shaping melodic lines.  This first impression made me feel quite confident that the performing future of this teenager will be pretty much limited to family gatherings, since only loving and patient relatives are likely to endure more than a few minutes of this kind of playing... 
     That same year Lisiecki was signed to a recording contract by one of the biggest and most prestigious classical record labels (Deutsche Grammophon).  Two years later the 17-year old pianist made his debut with the New York Philharmonic, playing the Schumann concerto with the  same combination of interpretative vacuity  and tonal blandness.  (This performance was streamed on the orchestra's website.)   To Lisiecki's misfortune the attending New York Times critic was not Anthony Tommasini, who always has nice things to say about pianists so long as they happen to be cute twinks or fashionably attired hunks.  Instead it was Zachary Woolfe who summed up the most salient features of Lisiecki's playing by noting that "[f]rom the work’s impetuous opening bars, Mr. Lisiecki’s sound ... remained precisely the same through the rest of the concerto, with little variety of color...  He played all the notes but suggested few of the extroverted charms of a work that jumps from nocturne to mania."
 
After reading that New York Times review I felt pretty sure that the time had finally come for Lisiecki to go back to playing in nursing homes and at Polish weddings in his native Canada.  Yet less than two years later the 19-year old gave an all-Chopin recital at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.  Driven by morbid curiosity I listened to the broadcast of that Concertgebouw recital only to be impressed by the remarkable consistency of this pianist.  Even in miniatures (waltzes, nocturnes) he had absolutely nothing worthwhile to say about the music he played.  But the most resounding nothing was reserved for the sole big work on the program - the complete Preludes Op.28 - on which Lisiecki lavished all the interpretative vacuum and pianistic monotony he must have had nurtured and perfected since the beginning of his career as a concert pianist.

But then again, cute puppies can sell anything including mediocre performances of art music...