When we announced that Evgeny Kissin had been selected as the recipient of the 2020 Ruhr Piano Festival Prize, we could not foresee that the award ceremony would not take place until June 2021, and that Kissin’s performance would mark our first return to concert formats with a live audience in an auditorium after eight months of obligatory hiatus. The experience of hearing Kissin at the Konzerthaus in Dortmund was all the more thrilling. In his laudatory speech, music critic Wolfram Goertz praised the world piano star for his “spectacularly earnest” approach to piano playing: “What is fascinating about his art is that it has still preserved its immediacy.” This concrete, immediate rapport with music and with the audience will once more be evident in Wuppertal, when Evgeny Kissin shall return to perform for the seventh time at the Festival, with works by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin.