Siberian-born Pavel Kolesnikov soared into view after winning the Honens piano competition in 2012 in his early 20s. More than a decade later, he has established a mix of standard concerto performances with idiosyncratic, smaller-scale projects: a choreographic collaboration, chamber-music partnerships and imaginatively off-piste recital programming.
For his latest Wigmore Hall appearance, bookending 18th-century French keyboard music with Chopin, Kolesnikov sloped on to the stage largely hidden behind his own hair. He sat abruptly but caressed the opening of Chopin’s Waltz in C sharp minor Op 62 No 2 as if he’d been at the keyboard for hours, his touch cashmere-soft, the sound almost outrageously intimate. Movements from a suite by the long-forgotten French composer Jacques Duphly followed without a break. Kolesnikov emphasised the contrasts – between spare, crisply articulated contrapuntal meandering and flurries of liquid passagework, the harsh and the barely audible – as if the five movements were a single fantasia composed in Chopin’s era, not Duphly’s.
There was more calculated harshness in Chopin’s Nocturne in E flat Op 55 No 2, finely balanced by rhapsodic legato passages and exquisite smudges of pedal. In Kolesnikov’s hands, Chopin’s tempi were ever-flexible, phrases woven into a constantly shifting musical fabric. His performance after the interval of Chopin’s Piano Sonata No 3 in B minor Op 58 was even more controlled. Kolesnikov focused intensely on the through-line as he pushed through glissandi rising, elemental, out of the bass, through quicksilver filigree in the second movement and the slow blossoming of the third into the hyper-Romantic wild ride of the finale.
But it was his central selection of movements by Rameau (whose reputation was, ironically, at its historical nadir during Chopin’s lifetime) that ultimately showcased Kolesnikov’s virtuosity as a sculptor in sound. Once again, contrasts were high-definition: quiet passages tinkled like a music box, fast episodes remained impossibly limpid. Kolesnikov drew us through all of it with his unerring sense of a continuous musical line.
