Page 689 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

excelled with singing of disarming expression and purity of tone, profiting from
the playing of Joseph Middleton such a reliably percipient colleague.

27.7.2022 – Piano Duet: Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy (piano, four-hands)

Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy © Eva Vermandel

My next concert was a piano duet with Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy
coming together with four hands at one piano for a programme of
Austro/German music. Kolesnikov was born in Siberia and Tsoy in Kazakhstan
are now both London based. In 2019 they founded the Ragged Music Festival at
the Ragged School Museum the former Dr Barnardo ‘ragged school’ in the East
End of London. Passionately committed chamber musicians Kolesnikov and
Tsoy are both accomplished piano four-hand performers and it quickly showed.

It was Schubert who elevated the form of the piano four-hands from mere

parlour room music played by amateurs to the level of serious chamber music.
So, it seemed fitting to open with the Sonata in B flat, D617 likely the most
popular of his sonatas and fantasies for piano four-hands. It seems that
Schubert wrote the Sonata for two countesses whilst their music tutor at
Esterházy. With Kolesnikov and Tsoy displaying great skill with this admirable
work it felt like hearing chamber music at its most human. Next came the
Fantasia in F minor, D940 written by Schubert in the year of his death. With
such compelling playing I viewed the duo as alchemists providing an elixir of
delight and comfort.

After the interval Kolesnikov and Tsoy turned to the music of Brahms with
sections from the two books of Liebeslieder Waltzes. In Ländler style