East Neuk Festival: Kolesnikov and Tsoy
Crail Church - 02/07/22
Crail Church was the venue on the 2nd July for a recital by the 4-hands piano duo, Samson Tsoy and Pavel Kolesnikov. Keen attendees of the Festival who had caught their playing of Schubert in two earlier concerts will have eagerly awaited this imaginative programme, with a series of Beethoven and Kurtág miniatures framed by a Poulenc sonata and the pièce de resistance, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.
The 3-movement Poulenc Sonata for Piano 4-Hands is in the composer’s customary whimsical vein, but with some Satie and Stravinsky influences. The Prélude suggests a bustling street scene, with musical echoes of ‘Petrushka’, though more Parisian than Russian. The slow melody ‘Rustique’ has a French shape but an oriental feel. The brisk Final is in the character of a French street song, seems to beg for rude words to be added, but grinds comically to a halt. The short work was played characterfully with great wit and élan.
The miniatures comprised Beethoven’s 3 Marches Op. 45, interleaved with a selection of short minimalist sketches from Kurtág’s 8 volumes of ‘Jatekok’ and, additionally, his arrangement of a Purcell lament, ‘The Queen’s Funeral March – Canzona’. All were skilfully performed and, whilst I cannot imagine searching any of them out for a second hearing (except possibly the Purcell arrangement), live or in recording, the overall effect was, to use a culinary analogy, of a tasty finger buffet.
Stravinsky’s 4-hands reduction of the huge score of his ‘Rite of Spring’ must rank as an extraordinary achievement. One might expect the loss of the ground-breaking innovative use of orchestral colour, multi-layered polyrhythms and dynamic contrast present in the original to render the arrangement a pale imitation. But it is no such thing. Indeed, in places, the clarity of the texture is enhanced and the daring rhythms, dissonances and indeed the overall dramatic impact are even amplified. There can be no doubt that this version is extremely technically demanding on the performers, but no visual or aural clues to this fact were perceptible to the audience. With supreme virtuosity, Kolesnikov and Tsoy delivered a breathtaking and memorable performance.
Unfortunately, in the Second Part of ‘Le Sacre’, at a quieter point in the score known as Ritual Action of the Ancestors (an irregularly repeated rising cor anglais chromatic glissando over pizzicato strings in the orchestral score), an audience member’s unmuted mobile phone received a call and rang out a jingle. She managed to extract it from her bag and silence it after a few seconds, but the spell was broken. Please, please fellow concertgoers: silence your phones.
Cover photo: Neil Hanna