Most musicians with regular duet partners will have been feeling the wrench of separation during lockdown, but not the pianists Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy, who live together, and who alongside flourishing solo careers have been performing as a duo since teaming up at the Royal College of Music only a few years ago. This programme, rounding off a heartening first week of Wigmore lockdown recitals, drew us in with a quietly electrifying intimacy.
They began with Brahms. Although the title of the Liebeslieder Waltzes might seem to promise sentimentality, No 16 was a dark, stormy way to start. But it’s a piece whose angry energy is spent by the end, and it led into gentler numbers with a more obviously dance-like energy, brought to life with an unfaltering sweetness of touch and an easy, unobtrusive sense of momentum – qualities present in everything these two played.
The pair swapped places, Kolesnikov now taking the topmost lines, for Beethoven’s Waldstein Variations, mercurial and sometimes mischievous. But it was Schubert that provided the real high points. First solos, either side of the Beethoven: Tsoy’s thoughtful, immaculately sustained Impromptu No 2 in A flat; Kolesnikov’s introspective yet vibrant medley of waltzes and ländler. Then, with Tsoy back at the upper end of the keyboard, there was the F minor Fantasie, its long, obsessive episodes masterfully paced so that it tightened and unwound like a spring.
How to follow that? Ravel’s hymn-like Jardin Féerique from Mother Goose made a perfect encore: finally, slowly letting go of the concert’s inward focus, it finished in a clang of chords and glissandos full of hope and celebration.
• Available on BBC Sounds, or streamed on YouTube and the Wigmore Hall’s website.
