Pavel Kolesnikov, the pianist whose new release on Hyperion we have been waiting for with such impatience… And here he is now recording with Harmonia Mundi. In this program of Schubert’s 4-hand works (Fantasy And Hungarian entertainment) with Samson Tsoy, increased by Optical illusion by Leonid Desyatnikov (a contemporary composer whom Kolesnikov had played at Orford), the problem is not the playing, flexible, refined and infinitely weighed, but the “disc product”. Here we have the exact counterpart of Lucas Debargue’s complete Fauré. In both cases, well before the composer, the subject or element that attracts attention is the piano. Fauré is ruined by the chilling high notes of the Paulello piano. The intimacy, life, and naturalness of this Schubert are flattened by the sound X-ray of the “Yamaha CFX Grand Concert Piano (serial number 6560000)” with its entrails laid bare by Alban Moraud’s microphones. No trompe-l’oeil, but the eardrums on the hammers. What vulgarity, what betrayal, what a waste!
Click here to listen to an excerpt.
To see in video