REVIEW: Kolesnikov and Tsoy in Serious and Sensuous Duet Debut
Above, Samson Tsoy and Pavel Kolesnikov. Photo © 2024 Stefan Cohen.
February 13, 2024
Talk about relationship goals. Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy met as piano students at the Moscow Conservatory in 2007, and now share a home in London from which they base their respective careers as distinguished solo concert pianists. The couple joins forces in repertoire for one piano, four hands, recently making their debut as a piano duo in Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall.
This niche musical partnership proved an ambitious force of nature in a serious and sensuous program — from Schubert’s Fantasie in F Minor, classic of the genre, to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Gracefully athletic and sharply probing, the duo’s keyboard artistry takes the form of a series of gestures curated to create a sense of the moment.
Samson Tsoy and Pavel Kolesnikov at Carnegie Hall. Photo © 2024 Stefan Cohen.
Igor Stravinsky’s four-hand piano arrangement of The Rite of Spring was fashioned by the composer to be utilized for rehearsal purposes. (An amusing thought: the image of two wearied dance accompanists laboring at a threadbare upright, while a corps de ballet is put through their paces, inevitably struggling to follow the irregular rhythms in the ground-breaking score.)
But there was no weariness in this Rite; its strains of Russian folksong brim and seeth in the pianists’ bones. While an average Millennial couple was watching reality television, Kolesnikov and Tsoy were dissecting and perfecting this puzzle of an arrangement. Could any video game compare with the visceral satisfaction of sitting arm-locked with your lover, bringing to life The Augurs of Spring (Dance of the Young Maidens) at the piano?
This Rite was an athletic achievement on par with that of a pair of Olympic figure skaters. Side by side, the pianists carve space for, and bolster, each other, negotiating the Twister-like physical challenges with suave, alluring choreography, entwined like swans.
Kolesnikov and Tsoy have distinct personalities and strengths, and each brings his own bag of tricks to the collaboration. On the Primo part in the treble territory, Tsoy is poised high at the keyboard. He feels each note with intensity, and filters a surging passion through calculated voicing and vigilant rhythmic precision. Kolesnikov sits more deeply in the keys of the Secondo bottom half of the instrument, and vibrates with the inner pulse of the music. They share a sense of being intensely present in the tension of the moment, holding the listener in suspense.
Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy play Ravel for an encore. Photo © 2024 Stefan Cohen.
The second half of the program centered on Franz Schubert’s Fantasie in F Minor, D. 940, preceded by a contemporary paraphrase of it composed for the duo by Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov. Trompe-l’oeil (Optical Illusion), takes the structure and raw materials of the Fantasie, then samples, shuffles, and distorts them into something new, adhering to the dimensional blueprint of the Fantasie. Kolesnikov and Tsoy weaved from it a dreamscape, amazingly finding colors that Stravinsky didn’t employ in Rite, conjuring a spell, even as the piece overstayed its welcome.
Avoiding applause, the pianists discreetly slipped into the Fantasie. At first, we still peered through a gauze: Kolesnikov’s undulating F minor chord accompaniment was a soft, pillowy cushion, enhanced with just enough pedal to envelop Tsoy’s melodic opening theme in a hazy air of melancholy.
Schubert places one foot in the Classical, and another in the Romantic; Kolesnikov and Tsoy draw from both. Their interpretation, adorned with Fosse-like hand gestures and passages in which they conduct each other, makes voyeurs of the audience.
They flipped roles for an enchanting encore of Le garden féerique from Ravel’s Ma mère l’oye. Kolesnikov and Tsoy — for their fierce individualism and modish sophistication, in addition to their skillful musicianship — is a collaboration to watch.
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