There was no doubt that a lot of thought went into the planning of Pavel Kolesnikov’s latest Wigmore recital programme, a carefully arranged sequence of miniatures in the first half, followed by something more substantial after the interval. In a disembodied (pre-recorded?) spoken introduction, Kolesnikov described the pieces in his sequence as dramatic characters brought on to the stage in turn.
Those “characters” were the movements of Debussy’s suite Children’s Corner, interleaved with pieces from Helmut Lachenmann’s Ein Kinderspiel. There was some Chopin (a mazurka and a study), Liszt’s La Campanella and the C sharp minor Prelude from the second book of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier in the mix, before it all ended with Feux d’Artifice from Debussy’s Préludes.
Some of the performances were striking – La Campanella was delicate and dazzling, without a hint of empty bravura, Children’s Corner was delicately shaded, Feux d’Artifice almost angrily explosive. But if these were characters who were meant to relate to each other, they didn’t do so in any meaningful way, and even the rationale for the order of the sequence remained entirely elusive.
Why, for instance, did Kolesnikov play Lachenmann’s Schattentanz, in which only the rattle of fingers hitting the piano keys is heard, twice? And why was there a break for applause in the otherwise seamless sequence before the final two pieces – the naggingly repeated clusters of Lachenmann’s Filter-Schaukel and Feux d’Artifice?
If such questions eventually became a distraction, then Kolesnikov began the second half with another teasing juxtaposition, prefacing Schumann’s C major Fantasy with a piece by Louis Couperin, Le Tombeau de M de Blancrocher. Their connection proved to be the plodding way in which he approached both pieces, so that sections in the Couperin became totally detached from each other, and one of Schumann’s most daringly original formal designs lost most of its coherence and poetic power.
There were still flashes of the immensely talented pianist that Kolesnikov certainly is, but here the self-conscious cleverness of his programme almost entirely negated them.
