Pavel Kolesnikov

Pavel Kolesnikov

Piano

Pavel Kolesnikov is managed in the Benelux by Leontien van der Vliet.

Contact:
E: leontien.vandervliet@interartists.nl
T: +31 6 5 24 68 707

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In 2012 pianist Pavel Kolesnikov became a sensation at the Honens International Piano Competition when he took home the world’s largest piano prize. The London-based pianist was born in Siberia into a family of scientists. He studied both the piano and violin for ten years, before concentrating solely on the piano. He has studied at Moscow State Conservatory with Sergey Dorensky, at London’s Royal College of Music with Norma Fisher and at Brussels’ Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel with Maria João Pires thanks to the generous support of Mr Christopher D Budden, the RCM Scholarship Foundation and Hattori Foundation. Pavel is the recipient of the Milstein Medal and is the RCM Benjamin Britten Piano Fellow, and was a member of BBC Radio 3’s New Generation Artists from 2014 to 2016.

Celebrated for his imaginative, thought-provoking programming which offers the listener a fresh, often unexpected perspective on familiar pieces, Pavel has given recitals at the Wigmore Hall and Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, as part of the international Piano Series, Carnegie Hall in New York, and Berlin's Konzerthaus, the Louvre and Salle Gaveau in Paris, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, and the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam. In recent years he also performed at La Roque d’Antheron festival, the Musiq3 Festival in Brussels, Piano aux Jacobins in Toulouse, and the Aldeburgh Festival, among others.

Following performances with the London Symphony Orchestra at Classical Pride this summer, the 24/25 season sees Pavel give recitals at Southbank Centre, Wigmore Hall, Concertgebouw Bruges, Spivey Hall and Severance Music Center as part of the Cleveland Orchestra’s Piano Series. He also returns to The Hallé, Bournemouth Symphony, Hong Kong Sinfonietta and debuts with Adelaide Symphony.

Highlights of the 23/24 season included concertos with the Danish National Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Netherlands Philharmonic and at the BBC Proms with the BBC Scottish Symphony, collaborating with conductors Susanna Mälkki, Manfred Honeck, Sir Mark Elder, Alpesh Chauhan, Gemma New, Alexander Bloch and Vasily Petrenko.

Pavel’s seven-concert residency at the 2023 Aldeburgh Festival showcased the breadth of his artistic vision. In addition to recitals and concertos with the Britten Sinfonia and Sinfonia of London, Pavel gave immersive performances with partner and pianist Samson Tsoy. The duo have since performed at Carnegie Hall, Barbican Centre and BOZAR.

Aldeburgh also saw the premiere of "Celestial Navigation" – a sequence of music featuring projections by architect Sophie Hicks and text by Martin Crimp. Pavel's other cross-genre collaborations include his realisation of Bach’s Goldberg Variations with dancer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker which has been staged over fifty times across Europe.

Kolesnikov records for Hyperion, with repertoire ranging from rarely heard harpsichord pieces by Louis Couperin to Tchaikovsky's The Seasons. His Chopin Mazurkas album won Diapason d'Or de l'annee, one of world's most prestigious awards in the area of recording. The Guardian gave Bach's Goldberg Variations five stars and wrote: 'Kolesnikov’s Goldbergs are softly spoken, but they are also extraordinarily eloquent.' His last album "Poèmes & Valses of Reynaldo Hahn appeared in June 2022.

In 2019, together with Samson Tsoy, Kolesnikov started Ragged Music Festival at the Ragged School Museum, former “ragged school” of Dr Barnardo in London’s East End. In the same year Kolesnikov was honoured with the Critics’ Circle Young Talent Award 2019 for piano, praised for his “intensely personal interpretations, often daring in their originality” and his “crusading vision”.

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Highlights 2024

Jul 2024 Barbican Centre, London Saint-Saëns: Piano Concerto No. 2 London Symphony Orchestra part of Classical Pride

22 Sep 2024 Wigmore Hall Chopin: Selected Waltzes, Nocturnes and Mazurkas Schubert: Piano Sonata in B flat, D960

Sep 2024 Severance Music Center, Cleveland Bach: Goldberg Variations part of The Cleveland Orchestra's Piano Series

Nov 2024 Bridgewater Hall, Manchester Saint-Saëns: Piano Concerto No. 2 The Hallé and Nodoka Okisawa

Jan 2025 Southbank Centre, London solo recital "Le Rayon vert" with works of Mozart and Ravel

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Reviews

“Very few pianists of Kolesnikov’s generation share his abundance of intelligence, sensitivity, musicality, imagination, and sheer instrumental mastery.”

— Gramophone

“In short, there’s no better Reynaldo Hahn piano collection on the market. Atypical of Hyperion, the booklet notes offer fanciful commentary from the pianist rather than useful composer/repertoire information.”

— Jed Distler, Classics Today

“Pavel Kolesnikov has never shied away from imaginative programming, connecting small pieces and movements from larger works so as to provoke fascinating encounters and transitions. In this case (full details below), he wished explicitly to pay tribute to Marcel Proust in his centenary year, intriguingly playing with conceptions of musical time — and what could be more apt for this of all novelists? I confess to having felt a little scepticism toward Kolesnikov’s claim, cited in the programme note, that Schubert and Proust would ‘merge miraculously’ in an ‘art of stretching time and communicating poignant intensity through what is intimate and even miniscule,’ but was quite won over by what I heard in practice.”

— Seen and Heard int. 05/02/2022 by Mark Berry

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