Review by Pavel Kolesnikov – Gifted Sound Sculptor | classical music

SPavel Kolesnikov, born in Iberia, rose to prominence after winning the Honens Piano Competition in 2012 in his early 20s. More than a decade later, he has created a mixture of standard concerto performances with small-scale, distinct projects: choreographic collaborations, chamber music partnerships, and imaginatively off-kilter concert programming.

In his most recent appearance at Wigmore Hall, where he closed out 18th-century French keyboard music with Chopin, Kolesnikov took to the stage largely hidden behind his hair. He sat up suddenly but was caressing the Overture of Chopin’s Waltz in C sharp minor, Op 62 No. 2 as if he had been sitting at the keyboard for hours, the touch soft of cashmere, the sound hideously intimate. Movements from a suite by the long-forgotten French composer Jacques Doble followed without interruption. Kolesnikov emphasized the contrasts – between the perfectly articulated stratigraphic meanders and the fluid waves of the passages, harsh and barely audible – as if the five movements were a single fantasy composed in the era of Chopin, not Dufley.

There was more measured cruelty in Chopin’s quiet piece in E flat Op 55 No 2, which was delicately balanced by impassioned stringed passages and brilliant splashes of pedal. In Kolesnikov’s hands, Chopin’s rhythms were always fluid, the phrases woven into an ever-changing musical tapestry. His post-interval performance of Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 3 in B minor Op 58 was more controlled. Kolesnikov focused intensely on the inter-line as he pushed through the rising, initial, off-bass glissandi, through the mercurial filigree of the second movement and the slow flourish of the third in the intensely romantic wild ride of the finale.

But it was his central selection of movements by Rameau (whose reputation, ironically, was at a historic low during Chopin’s lifetime) that ultimately demonstrated Kolesnikov’s virtuosity as a sculptor of sound. Once again, the contrasts were sharp: the quiet passages tinkled like a music box, and the fast loops remained impossibly clear. Kolesnikov draws us through it all with his unerring sense of the musical throughline.