He is a prodigious pianist who visited Montreal on Sunday at the invitation of the Ladies’ Morning Musical Club, delivering an extraordinary recital.
The records didn’t lie. Pavel Kolesnikov, in real life, is as we discovered him in his recordings released by Hyperion: a magician of sound. In concert, too, the pianist really has this ability to multiply the nuances, and the beginning of his Polonaise-Fantasy op. 61 by Chopin becomes an object of fascination by this fact alone.
The Sonata D.894 is one of the greatest performances of a Schubert sonata we have heard in concert in forty years. It was at the level of D.959 by Radu Lupu, during a season of “Piano****” in Paris, where the producer had taken it into his head to have this penultimate sonata by Schubert played by Perahia, Brendel and Lupu in the space of some months !
Too handsome ?
Kolesnikov’s performance brings up a question raised on the record by The beautiful miller by André Schuen at DG: can a performance be too perfect, almost unbearably beautiful? However, in order to be able to follow it and enter it, Kolesnikov’s vision demands that we abandon ourselves to it. Kolesnikov does not interpret a text; he uses text to create sound worlds. A “normally sensitive” spirit follows him, but this approach can also be reproached to him.
In Schubert, the traveler (the Wanderer Schubertian) seems to be initially in a fairly thick shady forest, despite the tonality of floor major. The atmosphere lights up little by little to finish, in the ultimate Allegretto, as in a meadow flooded with light where the walker frolics. Kolesnikov sculpts in the air with his left hand these spontaneous and impulsive movements. And yet, in the ultimate measures, the traveler remains alone with himself.
We find this introspection, painful this time, in the development of the 1er movement and, above all, in the Andante cantabile of the Sonata K.310 by Mozart, a work that Kolesnikov qualifies as “tragic” and which he connects to the Waltz in A minor of Chopin.
We were going to write that it was one of the greatest recitals of our life, but by dint of looking for sounds where there are also lines and notes, by dint above all of permanent recreation, Kolesnikov exhausted his concentration. At the end of the central, dramatic section of a Prelude “by the drop of water” of great seriousness, he experienced a first alert, before getting lost somewhat (memory lapse) in the Polish-Fantasy. It was impossible to build up so much tension without taking a break after Schubert. Kolesnikov fortunately left us on a dream moment with the Mazurka op. 17 #4 (return to the minor)
The afternoon was memorable, and the verdict remains: we have among the young thirtysomethings, with Kolesnikov, Grovenor, Beatrice Rana and Geniušas, a skewer of artists who have nothing to envy to the legends of the past.