This season, you're one of our four portrait artists, alongside Jeanine De Bique, Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Jlin. Are you any familiar with their work? 

Pavel Kolesnikov: “Yes, I'm a little bit familiar with Janine and Anna's work. A few years ago at the legendary Aldeburgh Festival, Anna was a featured composer while I was an artist in residency. Strangely, we never bumped into each other, but I’ve managed to hear some of her pieces. She's an original artist and her music is fascinating.

I was also very happy to hear about William Kentridge’s big residency (Kentridge is this season's Grand Invité, ed.). He's an artist that I find very interesting and that I've been following since his show at the RA in London. The concept of the Centre for the Less Good Idea is very inspiring: it allows to take pressure off trying to achieve perfection and in choosing the right thing to do, which is often a kind of stalling situation for many artists - including  myself. ”

What attracts you to the work of Kentridge?

Kolesnikov: “I am always paying attention to the artists who are difficult to categorise. Kentridge has made very interesting work in vast variety of mediums - even artistic areas. I find this ability to freely move between different fields inspiring. His work often highlights the process which as a musician I find very relatable, but more importantly for me, it exhibits rather special, I would say, sharp balance - of humour and tragedy, of intellect and intuition, of transparency and obscurity. As a result, you get something surprisingly inexplicable, and I am very drawn to inexplicable. I’ve never met Kentridge, but I think there is a little bit of synergy in the direction in which I'm also trying to move. This will be particularly visible during Resonant Rooms (8 May), which for me is the centrepiece of my residency.”

During this event you have a carte blanche to curate the whole evening.

Kolesnikov: “That is a something I'm incredibly excited about because it's a possibility for me to work on something that I see as an important side of my work, but which is difficult to find space for in the context of classical music programming. When we were first talking about it, I had no idea about the theme of the 2026-27 season of Bozar – Reassembling – but this whole evening is dedicated exactly to that.

For me, it all started quite a long time ago when I met Alfred Brendel one night. I came over to play for him and he invited me to stay for dinner. We talked about many things and he was an incredibly generous, fascinating man. We watched some silent films and he also showed me a book of an artist I had no idea about: Joseph Cornell. That was about 15 years ago. I was still a student and this was a major discovery for me.”

Cornell assembled all kinds of found materials into poetic, little boxes, evoking whole new worlds.

Kolesnikov: “The artist became very important to me. Later on, thinking about his work, I realized that what I've been trying to do for many years is very similar. For me, a musical performance comes together as a combination of different objects and configurations that enter a sort of unique conversation. It's dealing with ready-made material: putting pieces together in a box – the stage – and letting them interact; giving a certain colour or light to each other. And this is what the Resonant Rooms is going to be about: those conversations and combinations within music as well as the way music interacts with words, visuals and space.”

Which conversations are you going to open?

Kolesnikov: “Some of the pieces already exist. We are going to do Celestial Navigation, which is dedicated to Joseph Cornell, and which was created with my collaborator, architect Sophie Hicks for the Aldeburgh Festival in 2023. And there will be three or four new pieces that are created specifically for Bozar. Some of these pieces are ideas that I already had for a long time and I was looking for a possibility to realise them. Others have been cultivated specifically for spaces at Bozar. The way I started working on Resonant Rooms was by visiting the place and seeing what it is, how it looks, how it feels, what the technical possibilities are, and so on.” 

So Bozar becomes a big box... It’s interesting how you talk about Cornell and his magical boxes. I think it's a beautiful metaphor for a concert.

Kolesnikov: “It's not really even a metaphor, it's sort of a literal description of what happens. It's a very simple model, but like many simple things, it takes a long time to figure out. It offers infinite possibilities for very different artistic expressions. And I think this idea is quite undeveloped. Among performing artists, at least in classical music, we are quite unaware of that still. The visual arts in the last ten years have been really important for me in the sense that my inspiration and my ideas in music – whether for original things like Resonant Rooms or for more regular performances – are always somehow coming through the interaction with visual arts and other art forms. Increasingly, I see that what we consider the limits of music, sound or classical music performance are self-imposed. And I can see that the borderlines between different art forms are much vaguer than we are used to thinking.”

Will you will also perform during the night?

Kolesnikov: “I will perform all of it. This is really demanding for me. I will be like the actor performing many plays and many different roles.” 

On 7 November you are also going to play all of Chopin’s Nocturnes. What attracts you to these pieces? And how will you shape the concert?

Kolesnikov: “I think they are the pinnacle of what Chopin has done. For me, they’re a kind of a pianistic and poetic Everest and to play them all together, one after another, is supremely challenging. I suspect it must be unexpectedly challenging for the audience, too - in a good sense. 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, in the end of his life, wrote some truly avant-garde music that baffled Wagner and does sound like it was written in the second half of the 20th century. It’s an interesting story. 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, in this way. 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 alters the interactions between the pieces and hopefully also allows the audience to rediscover them. I love working 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 properly hear for the audience because you always connect to your expectations of the piece. But it is the task of the performer to make them audible again.”

You are also coming on 2 February with your partner Samson Tsoy to play four hands. Have you always played together?

Kolesnikov: “We started playing together not so long ago, five or six years. We always had independent careers and very occasionally we played with each other. But during Covid, we were locked in the same apartment and were looking for a meaningful way to spend a lot of time together! We started digging the four-hand repertoire and only then we found out what it really was and realized that we really wanted to dedicate some serious effort to it. We spend a lot of time together and know each other so well after 20 years, which is the kind of connection that is needed for realizing this art form, which is in fact a lost art.”

Lost in which way?

Kolesnikov: “It's a very important part of culture that is almost completely gone now. I'm not talking so much about two pianos, but playing four hands was very common and it’s an interesting phenomenon of profound emotional socializing through art. People were sitting and playing together at the piano and the level of intimacy that it achieves is extraordinary because when you're expressing yourself in art, you're always very exposed. You cannot hide yourself in the same way you hide yourself within social norms or words. You expose your feelings, your way of thinking, your way of being. I think to play with someone is a very delicate, meaningful and respectful way of knowing each other very deeply. In the 20th century, this art form was lost because the times were changing and people didn't have time for that. It was replaced by other ways of entertainment, I think most often less meaningful.

You say a connection is needed. How so?

Kolesnikov: “It requires a huge amount of trust and openness between two people and it allows you to learn so much about the person. You need to know your partner very well and you need to be able to lean into him a lot because playing four hands on one piano is incredibly difficult. For me, it’s the hardest form of ensemble if you want to do it really well.”

And why is that?

Kolesnikov: “I think sharing the same instrument is a unique situation. You don't do it with other forms of ensemble. And piano is very unforgiving instrument in terms of togetherness. Creating the same sound and the same idea within one instrument with two driving forces is also a very paradoxical process. It takes a lot of time to merge everything together. You cannot really accelerate this process.”

The Kurtágs come to mind.

Kolesnikov: “Yes, his writing for four hands is a beautiful example of understanding exactly that. It's an extraordinary pleasure to play those pieces together. And we've done quite a lot of in them past. This year we had this very special performance that we were doing on his birthday at Klavier-festival Ruhr of his complete Bach transcriptions. And that is an astonishing part of the repertoire because it's so faithful to the original of Bach, and it is so recognisably Kurtág.” 

Speaking of repertoire, playing four hands was a social activity, so the abilities of the performers were variable.

Kolesnikov: “Most of the repertoire was not really created for the stage. It's between art and socializing. It's something very strange. So, some of the repertoire is not suitable for big stages or for performance, strictly speaking, or it needs a lot of reviewing because it was written in a way that it would be accessible to amateurs. But there is also a lot of repertoire that is astonishing and much of it is completely or almost completely forgotten. There are only a few popular pieces.”

What are you going to perform?

Kolesnikov: “Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms in a transcription by Shostakovich. It was made as an unauthorized transcription, that was later authorized. Shostakovich did it because he admired this piece very much, but there was not much access to Stravinsky in the Soviet Union. The situation was very complicated. The same of course goes for the religious context of the work. So, the transcription was made in a semi-private way and it is not well-known at all. It's very interesting for its historical context, for the meaning that it had for Shostakovich personally and for the fact that many musicians were able to familiarize themselves with the music through that arrangement. But it’s also a fabulous arrangement. It's so beautifully made. And Stravinsky's music is very pianistic. We are pairing with another great orchestral work - Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances in the original transcription for two pianos. For me, this is a true tour de force, perhaps, ultimately the most challenging work for two pianos."

You will also play Saint-Saëns’ Second Piano Concerto with the Belgian National Orchestra on 26 February. 

Kolesnikov: “Yes, this concert is a kind of fun interlude. There's a lot of serious music in this residency. And I also like doing things in a humorous way. So, I thought this concerto would fit very nicely. I adore this piece. It's a magnificent way of doing things with lightness and a lack of seriousness."

The concerto does begin very seriously though.

Kolesnikov: “I think as the piece progresses, the beginning becomes retrospectively ironic. Some critic famously said after the premiere: “It begins with Bach and ends with Offenbach.” And this is almost an indecent combination. The concerto is a strange assemblage of things, it's a little bit bewildering. It’s incredibly witty and well written. My dear friend George Benjamin considers it the best written nineteenth century concerto. And I can see why. The way different elements come together so neatly with such incredible brilliance, flair and unexpected sparkle is rather extraordinary. The concerto has been very popular in the first part of the 20th century, but these days we don't hear it that often. And I find that interesting because bringing it back now puts it in a slightly different context: it comes in a sort of postmodern light, which benefits it a lot. I think this concerto is best taken with a with a grain of salt. It's an ironic piece, which maybe was not obvious at any point of history, but I think it's very obvious when you bring it now - and that makes it so delicious!”

Cedric Feys & Guillaume De Grieve