Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy, partners onstage and off, began to play as a duo in school. Now, they are dedicating their careers to it.
Samson Tsoy, left, and Pavel Kolesnikov, who will make their Carnegie Hall as a piano duo on Feb. 13.Credit...Tom Jamieson for The New York Times
Kolesnikov, left, and Tsoy at their home in London, where the two moved in 2011 after growing up in Russia.Credit...Tom Jamieson for The New York Times
By Hugh Morris
Reporting from London
Feb. 10, 2024
It looked like some kind of grand music exam. The pianists Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy sat down at their instruments onstage at Wigmore Hall and began to play for an audience of two.
The rest of their listeners were online. It was June 2020, and Kolesnikov and Tsoy were, like virtually every other musician at that time, playing a livestreamed concert. Despite the hall’s chilly emptiness, there was something heartening: Here were two musical and romantic partners sharing a bit of their domestic lives as they worked through a messy pile of sheet music spread out on a single Steinway piano.
Now, things are more or less back to normal. When they sat for an interview at their elegant northwest London home recently, Kolesnikov had just returned from Copenhagen as a replacement soloist in Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto, and was about to jump in — in Copenhagen again — to play Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. (He could be heard frantically recapping the piece as he walked down the street. “It’s not something you can just pull out of your pocket,” he said.)
The pandemic forced Kolesnikov, 34, and Tsoy, 35, to recalibrate. After so much time spent at home together, returning meaningfully to the genre of four-hands music — through which they had met — they emerged with a desire to dedicate themselves to playing as a duo. They signed to new management as both solo artists and partners last October, and will make their duo debut at Carnegie Hall on Feb. 13, with their first album together to follow this summer.
“I consider this possibly the hardest form of chamber music,” Kolesnikov said of the piano duet. “This genre is a very interesting merge of something that is extremely homely, extremely intimate and private. Then one thinks, how do you take that onstage?”
A Domestic Art Form
The piano duet has always been closely tethered to the home. Grove Music describes it as a “modest, essentially domestic branch of music,” more frequently associated with a student’s early experiences than with the public-facing openness of a concert hall.
Part of that is because of its commercial function in history. The peak of the genre’s popularity was in the 19th century, in a time of mass-produced pianos and sheet music but before the advent of recordings. Shrewd composers saw an opportunity to take the concert hall into the home: Liszt adapted many of his orchestral works for multi-hands piano, and the entirety of Saint-Saëns’s catalog was available in four-hands arrangements.
The genre’s domesticity and proximity has made close relationships a thread throughout its history, be they romantic (Clara and Robert Schumann), familial (Wolfgang and Nannerl Mozart) or a mixture of the two (Edvard Grieg and Nina Hagerup, his first cousin and later wife). But the essence of duetting involves an intimacy that goes even further, Kolesnikov said: “You forget about yourself, and your reflexes become really superior to anything else.”
Kolesnikov and Tsoy first played together as students, and their intimacy is both the foundation of their approach to the genre and something neither of them sees in duet performances today.
“Often you encounter this genre as a festival encounter,” Tsoy said. “You have five, 10 pianists coming, and the festival director says, ‘Tonight, you will play Brahms Waltzes four-hands.’ Then people go onstage, that’s all they play, and they leave.” In such situations, Kolesnikov said, “there can sometimes be magical moments, but it almost never works.”
“It’s a shared heart, a shared soul that you somehow need to magically achieve,” he added. “And that is something that can only come with years: with years of experience, and years of knowing and understanding each other.”
Roots in Russia
Kolesnikov, born in Russia, and Tsoy, born in Kazakhstan, met in 2007 at the Moscow State Conservatory. They chose the piano duet as part of their chamber music exams, and together they began tackling Rachmaninoff’s Suite No. 2 for Two Pianos. The transition into being romantic partners happened organically, Tsoy said, like how everything seemed to happen in the conservatory living quarters.
They lived with fellow artists — including the singer Elena Stikhina, the conductor Maxim Emelyanychev and the pianist Dmitry Masleev — in the conservatory’s enormous communal dormitories. Everyone spent almost every waking moment together, cooking, washing, showering, practicing and discussing music.
For two gay men, “it was probably one of the best periods in Russian history in more than a hundred years,” Kolesnikov said, before Tsoy added, “20 years later, of course, we’re in a very different situation.” They lamented Russia’s declaration, last November, of the international queer movement as an extremist organization.
“It’s absolutely mind-blowing,” Kolesnikov said. “We couldn’t imagine anything like that, even when we left.”
Kolesnikov and Tsoy moved to London in 2011, and the change was a shock, particularly financially. They had both received full scholarships to study with Norma Fisher at the Royal College of Music, but, she said, “they had not a penny between them.” When they visited Fisher’s house for lessons, her husband would always cook for them.
“Those two boys were starving,” she said. “They had nothing.”
Things changed overnight in 2012, when Kolesnikov won the Honens, an international piano competition. Beyond the prestige of an important prize, he received 100,000 Canadian dollars (a little more than $72,000 today).
“Within weeks of winning the prize,” Fisher said, “they were both wearing Armani.”
Their home today has an arrestingly tasteful living room, where during a recent visit they sat on a bobbly sofa, as far apart from each other as possible.
“They are chalk and cheese,” Fisher said. “Pavel the poet, and Samson the maverick.”
But in conversation, the roles were almost comically flipped: Tsoy, relaxed and reclining slightly, offered louder yet more careful judgments; Kolesnikov, limbs curled underneath his body, delivered flatter opinions so quietly and inwardly that sometimes they could barely be heard.
As duet partners, the two seem to feed off each other. Rather than meeting in some imaginary middle onstage, they take from both of their expressive palettes. “The mix — to oversimplify — of Kolesnikov’s more inward, poetic exploration and Tsoy’s tendency to more extravagant expressivity makes them ideal duo partners,” Fiona Maddocks, the music critic for The Observer, wrote in an email.
Where they do meet is as aesthetes. A large red abstract painting hangs in their living room. It is by their first landlord, the artist Antoni Malinowski, who rented them a basement flat after they moved out of school housing. Daily interactions with him and his artistic practice during their seven-year stay became a shining example of how to live their lives aesthetically.
“Everything is extremely slow and extremely thought-through,” Kolesnikov said, “with absolutely nothing that is random but also nothing that is put in place forcefully, and all arranged in a very gentle way.”
Kolesnikov and Tsoy’s interests reach far: couture, architecture, painting, photography, theater, glass, perfume and, of late, gardening. They take all those seriously, in pursuit of a deeper understanding of music through other fields. It extends to their auteurist approach to programming, which combines imaginative concepts with changes to lighting and acoustics.
“It’s like building a play,” Tsoy said. “You’re a director, and you do everything.”
The result can be poetic or annoying, depending on your taste. Kolesnikov seemed to acknowledge as much in a solo recital at Wigmore Hall in November. Before Beethoven’s “Tempest” Sonata in the first half, and Schubert’s Sonata in A minor (D. 784) in the second, he played the same piece by Henryk Gorecki. “Repetitive sound,” he wrote in a program note, “can be torturous or induce a trance.”
Kolesnikov and Tsoy will play more Schubert when they come to Carnegie Hall: the Fantasie in F minor (D. 940) — in the spirit of their programming, following the four-hands arrangement of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.”
The pioneering gay musicologist Philip Brett has written about the Schubert Fantasie through a homoerotic lens, a praxis-derived reading of the work as performance of gay male desire. Kolesnikov and Tsoy are no strangers to similar readings of their own work. After a close-quarters performance of works by Bach and Kurtag during the Aldeburgh Festival last summer, Tsoy said, a woman told him, “That was the most sexual thing I have ever seen in my life.”
Homoeroticism is one way to read into the Schubert, Kolesnikov and Tsoy said, but Kolesnikov often cites a line from Joseph Brodsky: “Our artifacts tell more about ourselves than our confessions.”
When any pair of artists is so entwined, there is always a question of what happens when things change for the worse. To which Tsoy casually responded, “What will happen if you get out of your house and the bus hits you?”
Or what if they break up?
“We never talk about that,” Kolesnikov said quietly, before a rare raising of his voice. “We only speak about what will happen if we don’t have dinner after the concert.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/10/arts ... -tsoy.html