On 7 November you are also going to play all of Chopin’s Nocturnes. What attracts you to these pieces?
Kolesnikov: “I think they are the pinnacle of what Chopin has done. For me, they’re a kind of a pianistic Everest and it will be the most challenging evening. The Nocturnes are a huge collection of pieces and each one of them is incredibly complex. These pieces are his most original, it’s where his imagination shines the brightest. They are mysterious and misunderstood because we don't really know what they are: when you start looking at the Nocturnes, the notion of a romantic nocturnal nighttime piece disappears very quickly ... they're far more than that. Most of the time when the Nocturnes are done – and they're very rarely actually done together as a collection – they're performed in the chronological order. But I'm going to follow a different kind of logic that I found after working a lot on them.”
What logic did you find?
Kolesnikov: “When I tried to categorize them, I realized that there were, at least in my opinion, three very distinctive approaches. There are the ones that look back: they deal with some kind of recollection of the past, something vague and sometimes brilliant but distant. Then there are pieces that are very much in the moment. They are about intensity of experience in the now; they bring you very powerfully into some kind of magical world. And, finally, there are those that are imagining something that doesn't exist. They’re the future telling pieces, objects of something unimaginable. They are also the ones where Chopin experiments the most. I always think about him as a kind of avant-garde architect of sound, because the structures that he was creating – in particular towards the end of his life – are so extraordinary and full of fantasy, but also exquisitely balanced.”
This forward looking, avant-garde approach is something I associate with Liszt, for example in his later pieces.
Kolesnikov: “Liszt also was a very interesting avant-garde musician. With Chopin the avant-garde is very covered. The pieces look normal at first glance, but when you start digging a little bit into them, you understand how extraordinary and how completely unlikely it is to write something like this and there is nothing quite like it. The closest thing that comes to late Chopin is probably Wagner and Scriabin. But I think, in a way, Chopin achieved more successfully what Wagner was trying to achieve in much smaller forms: one of the late Chopin Nocturnes is five or six minutes long, but the depth and multidimensionality of feeling is like that of a Wagner opera.”
It sounds like we might hear the Nocturnes anew.
Kolesnikov: “My division of the pieces completely changes the interactions between the pieces and hopefully also allows the audience to rediscover them, because it's very interesting to work with material that is well known. And with the Nocturnes, you have a number of pieces that are extremely well known – they're always difficult to hear for the audience because you always connect to your expectations of the piece.”
