This marvellous, magical young pianist left his audience spellbound
You can tell a lot about a pianist by the way he or she executes the lonely walk from the wings to that looming black piano. Some saunter, some almost scamper, some sidle in as if they don’t want to be seen.
At his Southbank concert on Tuesday night, Pavel Kolesnikov emerged from the shadows like a pale wraith, looking like a tousle-haired web designer for a Shoreditch dotcom in casual black jacket with white piping, showing a flash of olive-green socks. One knew instantly that his sound would be weightless, and so it was. He glided to the piano without acknowledging us in any way, and within seconds had us all spellbound with the delicacy of his playing, in the first of Brahms’s musing, regretful late Intermezzos Op 117.
As this concert showed, it’s music that already inhabits an intimate poetic space, and has a special magical flavour, that brings out the best in Kolesnikov. What he offered was a series of poetic miniatures, some contained within a delicately ornamented suite of Baroque dances originally written for the harpsichord by Louis Couperin, the others from charming rural scenes by Tchaikovsky, with the three Intermezzos that make up Brahms’s Op 117 set threaded through the evening. Two things about Kolesnikov’s performances stood out. Nearly everything was played in the range of quiet to very quiet, with immensely subtle gradations of light and shade to highlight a melody here, an eloquently drooping inner part there. When Kolesnikov did play a loud chord, it was sharp and biting rather than weighty – which meant that when he finally did venture a big sound, in the hectic dance of Tchaikovsky’s Russian Rustic Scene, the effect was overwhelming.
The other thing was his extraordinary daring with speeds. The final Intermezzo by Brahms was taken with enormous slowness, in complete defiance of the composer’s direction of “walking, with motion”, but this allowed Kolesnikov to uncover the vast reservoir of pathos in the music. And within a slow tempo he would often stretch a significant chord or note, stopping time in its tracks.
The one piece that didn’t respond well to Kolesnikov’s intensely personal approach was Beethoven’s striding, witty 4th Piano Sonata. The selfconscious way he played the offbeat phrases in the first movement didn’t seem poetic, they just seemed odd. But this was the only disappointment in a concert that contained many marvels of poetic insight and pianistic subtlety.