Pavel Kolesnikov: Breaking Through the Barrier of Beauty

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Pavel Kolesnikov has just been nominated for the 2026 Gramophone Award for his two-piano recording with Samson Tsoy of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps and Ravel’s Ma mère l’Oye. On 18 August, at Snape Maltings, I watched him play all 21 of Chopin’s Nocturnes in a single evening. Before the concert, we sat beside the reed beds and talked at length.

Born in Akademgorodok, the “town of scientists” near Novosibirsk in Siberia, Kolesnikov studied with Sergei Dorensky, Norma Fisher and Maria João Pires. He won the Honens International Piano Competition in 2012, was a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist from 2014 to 2016, and became an Artist in Residence at Wigmore Hall during the 2020/21 season. He has also worked extensively across disciplines, collaborating with artists including David Hockney and choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. With Tsoy, he co-founded Ragged Music Festival, exploring what can happen when music is taken outside the conventional concert hall.

His new recording of Chopin’s Nocturnes will be released in October. In the conversation below, Kolesnikov talks about the two versions of the C-sharp minor Nocturne, why he decided to perform all 21 in one night, and why he believes Chopin has been “very misunderstood”. He also reflects on growing up in Siberia, leaving Moscow for London, his friendship with Hockney, his partnership with Tsoy, and the continuing influence of visual art on the way he thinks about music. On September 18, Pavel will return to the stage at Wigmore Hall, joining forces with Samson Tsoy, Adrian Brendel and tenor Bogdan Volkov for a concert commemorating the Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov.

In Conversation with Pavel Kolesnikov

LC=Lucy Cheung

PK=Pavel Kolesnikov

The Two Versions of the C-sharp Minor Nocturne

LC: Could you tell me a little about your new Chopin: Nocturnes album, which is also the programme for tonight? First of all, I’m curious about why there are two versions of the C-sharp minor Nocturne.

PK: It’s not entirely clear why there are two versions. It’s a little bit undocumented. Generally, with those early Nocturnes, even between scholars, there are some arguments about whether they are actually in minor or not. There is one that was recorded much later in his life, and the only autograph that we have is a late autograph. I still believe that, stylistically, it’s definitely an early piece. What is interesting is that he was returning to some of the elements of his very early style late in his life. It’s not a very long line, but by the time he was about to die, he was returning to some of those elements. I find it interesting in that respect that he recorded the minor Nocturne.

And with the C-sharp minor Nocturne, it exists in a few different autographs. One of them contains a very interesting rhythmic variation. It is slightly different altogether, but it really contains a rather magical and unique variation in the rhythmic arrangement in the middle section, where he crosses into a different time signature without changing it. It’s very interesting, and I came across it only when I was working on this album, so I decided to record it.

Also, I find it a very important piece. It was written when he had just left Poland, and it seems probably to have been a kind of letter to his sister. It was sent to his sister. I find it an incredibly personal piece in that sense. It is a very interesting sound world, which is a little bit harsh. It has lots of open fifths and fourths, but very long-distance, kind of empty intervals that ring. It makes me think of Chopin’s voice. It’s so special in particular, and this is why I decided to record it.

I recorded the two versions, and then I was thinking, do we need to put them both on? And then I thought, why don’t we put them both on the same level?

Playing All the Nocturnes in One Night: A Challenge Inspired by Yohji Yamamoto

LC: And when you’re going to play all of them together in one night, you haven’t played yet, but in your mind, comparing with playing them individually, what’s the difference?

PK: It’s very different, and it’s difficult. I’m still figuring out what it is like. Of course, it’s very different from recording. Needless to say, I always treat recording as a different kind of process. It’s like making a movie rather than making theatre. Live performance is completely different.

You know, we’re using today the piano that I used for the recording of that album. It’s the exact same one. I was just talking to the technicians about how we need to tune it in a completely different way. It cannot be tuned in the same way as it was for the recording because it’s a different process. I need to project into the audience rather than create this world for the microphone.

But, yeah, I’m digressing. You’re asking me about playing all the Nocturnes together. It’s a complicated task because these Nocturnes were created over a very long period, the 21 of them. They range from very early teenage pieces to very late and very important pieces. The last three Nocturnes, I think, are some of the most important works that he has done.

Some of them are very well known to the audience, extremely well known, and that’s always problematic because the audience has an expectation. It’s very difficult to make a listener really switch on in the moment, to listen to what is happening rather than listening to what is happening in their mind. And that is, of course, a task of performance.

Then there are pieces that are almost unknown to the general audience. I’m sure that everyone will find a piece that they were not very familiar with tonight in this set. But they require a lot of concentration, and of course a lot of that music is very introspective. It’s a large performance. It takes about two hours, so it is an intense task.

I was very scared of this, and I wasn’t even thinking of doing them in concert altogether until last autumn, when I was on tour and had an invitation to come to a Yohji Yamamoto show in Paris. I wasn’t going to go there, but on the day I suddenly realised I had this free day and technically I could go to Paris and make it. It would be a bit hard, but I could. For some reason, I felt I really must go there.

Samson was with me as well. We were touring together. We found on our seats a little card asking us to turn off our mobile phones and not photograph or film during the performance, but to connect to the moment. I thought it was a wonderful idea. I very much sympathised with that. It was done in a very respectful way, and I thought it was the right thing to do.

Then the show began, and it was one of the best shows of anything that I have seen. It was exactly that kind of task that I wanted to achieve, because the clothes were extremely rich in detail, and they were all occupying similar emotional territory. But the flow was arranged so that the small change that would keep you afloat would come at exactly the right moment. The pace was never interrupted.

It was the most fascinating thing because it was such a risky thing to do. I was sitting there thinking, you can only do something like this if you have been doing it all your life, and whoever told you you shouldn’t be doing it, you simply weren’t listening to them.

And that’s when I decided, well, I need to try to do it because it’s possible. It’s actually possible. It just takes a lot of experience and energy, but it’s so beautiful when it works. So I took it as a kind of challenge inspired by Yohji Yamamoto.

Pavel Kolesnikov at Snape Maltings © BPA

Chopin: “A Very Misunderstood Composer”

LC: So when you were talking before about some pieces that the audience are very familiar with, I wonder, were you sometimes worried that the sound of Chopin’s music becomes a cliché, and sometimes it’s too beautiful? Do you sometimes resist the temptation to make it dramatic?

PK: I think Chopin is generally a very misunderstood composer. We were just talking about it with my friend Glenn Brown yesterday. I think Chopin is a very misunderstood composer because he is a Romantic composer who used a language which is very centrally Romantic, but the kind of writing, the way he works with ideas, is very much not the central 19th-century thing. It has nothing to do with it, really. It’s much more an early 20th-century, or even mid-20th-century, sensibility that he had.

And there is this barrier of beauty. I call it the “barrier of beauty”, which can be almost impenetrable. As a performing art, I think there are certain techniques that you can use to help the listener overcome the barrier and get connected to the music in the moment.

Some of those things are very difficult to verbalise, and some of them just have to do with your charisma and stage presence, which you are either gifted with or not. But then there are some purely technical elements, elements of slight disruption.

I first started thinking about it, actually, learning again from visual arts. I was reading a book of interviews with Francis Bacon, one of my favourite artists, interviewed by David Sylvester. He speaks very openly and very eloquently about introducing chance into painting and disrupting the painting in this way to make it more real.

Ever since, I’ve been experimenting with that and seeing what can be done. I think I developed my own little inventory of small disruptions to the line or harmony during a performance, which I think are mostly unnoticeable. Whenever I do checks on my friends and listeners whom I trust, I never manage to witness them catching it in the process of doing that, but I think that it works.

There are certain ways of manipulating the phrase slightly that bring the listener in without them noticing that something is slightly wrong, slightly unnatural. It’s a very big problem, particularly for well-known music. And sometimes there is no way to do it with the music itself. So, let’s put it this way: sometimes it’s more efficient to do something else in order to disrupt or displace this familiarity rather than manipulating the music itself.

Actually, here in this hall I made an experiment which was very important for me, and I think was generally very successful. It was a performance that I did for the opening of the festival four or five years ago. It was a kind of theatrical performance inspired by one of my favourite artists, Joseph Cornell. It was a kind of surrealist spectacle, putting together music, a little bit of light, a little bit of film and words, done in collaboration with Sophie Hicks and Martin Crimp.

I didn’t have to do anything with the music itself, but the way the stage was arranged and the way the light was done was very subtle. It would not interfere with the music, really, but it was slightly surprising to the audience, I think, and slightly mesmerising. That already put them out of their comfort zone and allowed me to play pieces that were very familiar, but suddenly felt slightly outside their conventional context. And that helps as well.

Lots of my programmes function in this way. I think another very efficient way of doing it is creating a programme where there are some unusual combinations, where one piece influences the way you are perceiving the next one. In the last five, six, seven years, I’ve really only been doing those programmes. And this Chopin recital is a very new thing for me because I haven’t done a single-composer recital like that for a very long time.

LC: Why now? Is it a timing thing?

PK: Yes. I think it’s a little bit of a change of gear. I like the challenge and I like doing something else. I found that I’ve done quite a lot of that, and now I’m doing something that, for me, seems to be a little bit more difficult, actually.

And also because I like the idea of presenting all the Nocturnes together. I think it’s an incredible, very poetic, very unique collection of pieces. It’s very impressive, but it’s demanding, both for the pianist — it’s immensely demanding — and I think quite demanding for the audience.

Dreams, Memories and Visions

LC: I guess the Nocturnes sometimes put a bit of a limitation on the imagination.

PK: Definitely. And this is why I split them into three groups. I was trying to find the common threads among those Nocturnes.

I figured out pretty early on, when I was working on them, that not all of that is nocturnal music, in fact. There’s a lot of it that is full of light, whether it is reflected light or an internal light, or some kind of fire. That is not necessarily nocturnal.

They are Nocturnes in the sense that they are happening, I think, in your imagination. They’re not literal descriptions.

I started looking and playing with them, and then I decided — because I like putting things into categories for myself. I think that’s my scientific background speaking in me — that there were three interesting categories which work for them quite distinctly: dreams, memories and visions.

Memories, of course, are something that is about looking back. Dream is about being in a moment, or this is how I interpret it in this context. And vision is something that is coming, is looking forward, something that hasn’t happened but might be.

I found that these pieces are actually falling into those categories for me. Sometimes the same piece is both a memory and a dream, or a dream and a vision. They flow between those, but I think this is about the right area which they occupy altogether.

Growing Up in Siberia’s “Town of Scientists”

LC: I wanted to ask you a little bit about your upbringing, and you just mentioned your scientific background. Could you tell me a little bit about your upbringing in Siberia?

PK: Well, I was born in a place called Akademgorodok, which means “the town of scientists”. It was an important research centre that was built after the Second World War in the very middle of Russia.

It was, I think, a very happy, very free place in Soviet Russia, actually, and very culturally advanced. But I was born in 1989, which was a couple of years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, so I didn’t really experience the place crumbling afterwards, because there was no funding for science at all. And by now it has reinvented itself as an IT centre.

But when I was growing up, the place was more of a memory, a bit of a sweet memory. But I still understand, and can still feel, how wonderful it was in its heyday. It was a very idealistic haven in Soviet Russia.

My parents were scientists, and most of my grandparents were also scientists. Generally, it was a very scientific circle, and I could have become a scientist probably. It was just a little bit of luck that I...

LC: What was music like in your childhood?

PK: I think it was very customary for everyone to play a musical instrument in that circle. Everyone had a piano or guitar or violin or accordion. My father played piano, accordion and guitar as well.

LC: Classical?

PK: No, not only. He did a little bit of jazz and a little bit of, how do you call it, songs and singing with the guitar, and wrote his own music. He also played Chopin. Chopin was one of the first composers I encountered, I think. Some of those Nocturnes were some of the first pieces that I ever heard.

So I grew up with that. We had an upright piano, and I started playing it a little bit. Then I had an opportunity to go to a music school because music education was free, as all education was free at the time.

So I started studying and, long story short, I became quite advanced. At some point I ended up in a special music school, and then I went to the conservatory.

LC: Where?

PK: Moscow.

From Moscow to London

LC: And then you came here in 2011 to continue your studies at the Royal College of Music. I can imagine that was quite a switch of artistic identity, probably in a very different environment.

PK: You mean between Russia and the UK?

LC: Yeah.

PK: Yes, very different. I feel very lucky that I left at that time. It was the right time for me to leave. I had some personal reasons to try to leave, but also it was very much about getting out of that musical circle, which was very rich in Moscow, but also very isolated in a way.

When you study at the Moscow Conservatory, you feel you’re in the centre of the world. At that time, at least, it felt like that. It was very self-contained in a way. That meant you could learn great things there and become very accomplished, but it was still quite limited.

For me, it felt very one-sided. I didn’t quite know what it was about. But instinctively I felt that it would be good for me to go somewhere else.

I ended up here in the UK, and I think it was a very, very lucky decision. It is a very open scene, in the sense that it’s one of the most inspiring musical scenes, in London in particular. It’s very interesting because it’s so broad. There are so many different things happening, and it’s not so well defined as it is in other places. So you don’t feel the urge to specialise so much in one thing or another.

That was absolutely suitable for me. That’s exactly the thing that I think is right for me.

Pavel Kolesnikov at Snape Maltings © BPA

David Hockney and the Influence of Visual Art

LC: You have collaborated with visual artists and painters, like David Hockney last year.

PK: Yes, and some of my big projects were for David, and it’s fascinating. In general, working with David has become a very important — life-changing, really.

LC: Did he influence in any way your perception of, for example, light and colour in music after that collaboration?

PK: I think obviously there is influence. Whenever you’re working with someone, there is influence. I’m very sensitive to other influences. I feed on influences. I’m very open to them. Whenever I’m working with another artist that I respect, I notice that I change, and sometimes it’s very difficult to verbalise how I change.

For instance, I worked with Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, a great Belgian choreographer and dancer. I worked a lot with her. I know that she is really now in my system. I’m very conscious of the fact that Anne Teresa is somewhere in my blood, and that continues.

And with David, it’s the same thing. There is an influence of his colour and his way of seeing, and his curiosity. But I think mostly, for me, with David, it has been a very affirmative influence.

I was so fascinated from the very first time that I saw a big retrospective of his in London in 2015, I think. I was so fascinated and encouraged by his daring curiosity, his ability to get out of his own way, and his fearless experimentation.

It can be very hard for an artist. The fear of losing yourself is a very big fear. And the fear of doing something that is not as good as what you have done before is a great fear, and it’s a very difficult thing to fight. I think from a rather early age I was conscious of that counterproductive energy in an artist’s life.

And with David, particularly when Samson and I met him in his last years, it was incredible to witness how there was nothing that stopped him from doing yet another different thing, just trying to see if it worked or not, and being very courageous like that.

I think that, for me, is the greatest affirmative power of the last few years. It’s just so encouraging to go and try things.

LC: How did you meet?

PK: We met with our friend Norman Rosenthal. David wanted to hear us, but he wasn’t strong enough to go out to many concerts. So we paired up with Yamaha and decided we were going to bring our piano to David’s studio.

We brought a grand piano, similar to the one that I’m using today, to his studio and played The Rite of Spring for David. He was so happy. He really loved music, understood it very deeply, and was one of the great, great music lovers. For him, it was so exciting.

That was a few years ago. Ever since, we stayed in touch and worked on this retrospective. We were also working on something else for David, for his show at the Serpentine, but unfortunately he passed away and it never happened.

I didn’t expect David to leave us so soon, to be honest. He was so full of energy and looking forward to the new things that he was going to do.

LC: Is music visual to you?

PK: No, I think that’s the wrong way to put it. I think music, for me, is incredibly interconnected with every other art form.

I think, in a way, it’s easier to understand an art form by comparing it to other things, seeing what the similarities are and what the differences are. I don’t think that I visualise it. Of course, sometimes visual associations come to you. But more importantly, I can see that there are certain things in music that work in a very similar way to how painting, or any visual art form, works.

Take composition, for instance. It’s easier to understand composition in music when you are thinking about it in visual terms. Because music is something that develops in time, and I think for us it’s generally a less natural thing to grasp as a whole — something that develops in time. We struggle with that.

But something that we can see in a single moment, we can analyse more freely in terms of its form and structure. So that is one example.

But I think in our times we tend to separate one thing from another too much, one area of life from another too much. For me, the ideal way of living and being as an artist or not an artist is a kind of giant, constant work where everything is connected. There isn’t much direct separation between different things.

LC: What about between genres of music? Do you feel the same way?

PK: Yeah, I feel the same way. In terms of quality, of course, classical music contains just an extraordinary amount of artworks of extraordinary quality. Other genres may not have been around for so long, or may have developed in slightly different ways. They didn’t develop that amount of material.

But generally, I don’t make much distinction between good music of one or another genre. I happen to be more knowledgeable, of course, about classical music because that occupies most of my time in life and so on. But the more I live, the more I really can’t see a distinction.

Richter’s Influence

LC: Is that the cross-discipline, that inner connection between art forms and music genres? Was it after 2011, after you came to the UK, that you realised that, or did you already have it?

PK: Well, I first got a sense of it reading about Sviatoslav Richter and reading his diaries. I think for him it was very much like that. He really just didn’t disconnect one thing from another. He happened to be a pianist, but he could have been any other artist. In fact, I think he treated the piano as his instrument rather than viewing himself primarily as a pianist. In that sense, he was a musician and not a pianist.

I remember I was about 15 years old when I got my hands on those books about him, and I learned those books by heart. I read them so many times, him talking about music and then switching to art, and everything coming together so naturally and in such a fascinating way.

I found it such a fascinating world, such a beautiful world where everything was vivid and connected, and one thing would activate another in such an unpredictable, beautiful way.

I think that became part of my system, and I started figuring out my own way in that kind of world.

“From the Very First Time I Heard Him (Samson) Play, I Was Fascinated”

LC: And then you met Samson here?

PK: No, we met in Moscow in 2016, and we came here together. We do a lot of work together. Ever since COVID in particular, we really formed the duo during COVID because we were locked in the same apartment. We were trying to see what we could do, and we had time to work on this.

Of course, it’s a very hard form of ensemble. You need to spend a lot of time together in order to be able to play four hands on one piano or two pianos, just because I think it’s particularly difficult for both players.

And ever since, it became a big part of our lives. We do, I think, about 30 per cent of our concerts together now. We’ve already done our third recording, and we’ve done a lot of other things.

LC: So this close partnership, how does it influence your own artistic identity? Do you see it as a separate thing, or do they feed each other? Do you challenge each other?

PK: Yes, we challenge each other. But we have a very long history with that. It all started in Moscow, when we were regularly playing to each other. We learned from each other. I always feel that I learned so much from Samson.

Maybe this is why we can play together so well, because we were observing and sort of finding our way for so long before we really started working together. We had already influenced each other a lot.

I was always fascinated by his playing from the very first time I heard him, and I realised that he was a very different kind of musician, that he could do things that I found very difficult to do. I didn’t know how to do that, and I was really keen to learn.

It took a lot of time. For many years, we would very often play to each other and ask for feedback. And we learned how to give feedback to each other, which is very difficult, particularly when you’re so different.

I think Samson would probably say the same about me. He also appreciates that I’m a completely different kind of artist, in a way the opposite of him. But somehow, because we’ve been developing side by side for so long, really tracking each other’s progress and taking part in it in a way, I think we grew close. And this is how it became possible for us to play together.

We also like working on projects together. Most of those out-of-the-ordinary projects that we’ve been doing in the past six or seven years, we’ve been working on together, including the records. And it’s great because we have very different perspectives.

A Festival That Happened by Chance

LC: I’m quite curious about the Ragged Music Festival. Can you tell me more about it? How did you conceive the idea, and what did you want to do with it? Did you want to do something that a traditional venue or music festival couldn’t do?

PK: I think the Ragged Music Festival happened by chance, really. Our dear friend Erica Davis asked Samson and me to do a concert at the Ragged School Museum in East London, which is a beautiful, wonderful place. In some way, it’s not dissimilar from the situation here. It’s not so extravagant, but the essence is very strong. When she asked us to do it, we started looking into the logistics and realised that bringing the pianos there was very difficult because they needed to be lifted through the window with a crane. The window had to be dismantled, and it was becoming a big operation. So I told her, if we’re bringing a piano, maybe we should do at least a couple of concerts. That’s what happened the first time: we did two concerts. We found it so inspiring, and the atmosphere so different and stimulating, that we wanted to do more.

The beauty of that situation is that we can programme without looking at programming trends or worrying about ticket sales, because there aren’t so many tickets to sell. It always sells out quickly. We wanted to do things that were more difficult, or impossible, to do in a concert hall. It became a kind of small artist community, which I find really pure. It’s very difficult to achieve that on a larger scale. The beauty of it is that it remains small, so we can put experimental programmes together in different ways. We can also programme very late.

Early programming is a little bit of an inevitable evil of our industry. We have to plan, and that planning goes very far ahead. When I started, I had some experience working with the fashion industry, for instance, and I was so envious because they were working only a little ahead. That means they can really be in the moment of creation. For us, it’s all this planning. You’re thinking, “What am I going to play in three years?” Well, I don’t really know what kind of person I’m going to be by then.

So this is a unique opportunity that we’re able to explore. We were a little surprised, and very flattered and inspired, by the reaction of the audience, who really got it. We were surprised by its success. But then it became something a little bigger, because we realised that we could work in the same way in a different, interesting space, and create something specifically tailored to the energy of the place. That became a thread through all my work, more or less. I cannot get it out of my system, this way of working. Whenever there is a possibility, I consider what kind of circumstances the performance is going to be in.

With the Ragged Music Festival, it particularly pointed to this idea, so we started doing these travelling editions. The festival was done at the Muziekgebouw, which is a very different setting. It’s a bigger setting.

We still keep it very small in terms of the group. There are no more than eight artists in every edition, I think, and everyone takes part in every concert. Everyone is playing to get everything together. It’s mostly chamber music in different formations. The whole programme grows out of the energy of the place, how we understand it, and that particular moment.

LC: So if you’re going to do something in London in winter, is it going to be something quite spontaneous as well?

PK: Well, we’re only now starting to talk and think about it, and seeing which of our favourite collaborators could take part. From there, we’ll start putting together a programme that feels right for the time and the moment and the place and the light and the weather and so on.

Writer Lucy Cheung