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A,erican Record Guide: (07/2018) 
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Hyperion
CDA68224



Code-barres / Barcode : 034571282244

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Kolesnikov has been a New Generation Artist subsidized by the BBC. He’s quiet-spoken on the radio and in his piano playing. Our Editor didn’t like his set of Chopin mazurkas (J/F 2017), calling the interpretation “light, brisk, frivolous, and desultory”. For this next recording by Kolesnikov, a brisker lightness and frivolity would have been welcome. He doesn’t play Louis Couperin’s pieces like real dance music of the 1650s, despite the subtitle of the program (“Dances from the Bauyn Manuscript”). The Yamaha piano company co-sponsored this. Kolesnikov admits in the booklet that he had Yamaha’s technicians alter the piano’s action “to extend the range of expressive possibilities”. Well, this isn’t piano music. It’s at the summit of the harpsichord repertoire. Pianos aren’t expressive in the same ways harpsichords are. Harpsichords have more incisive attacks, quicker fades, percussive releases, and more variety from treble to bass. Piano tone is pleasant but lacking the complexity of high overtones. I appreciate the attempt to bring pianophiles a translation of this unfamiliar old music, but the piano is still doing things it wasn’t designed to do, against its own strengths. I enjoy playing harpsichord music on piano myself, but here it sounds too foreign—there’s too much sostenuto, and the music gets bogged down.

Kolesnikov is clearly a good pianist but not a harpsichordist. His performance “ain’t got that swing”, and his ornaments are foreign to the style. I admire the way he de-synchronizes the notes across the voices, mimicking what good harpsichordists do to clarify the voice-leading and make accents. Unfortunately, he doesn’t reassemble the notes and bigger phrases coherently. He makes theatrical miscalculations in choosing where to supply variety. He too often dissipates the energy by settling for quiet and slow pseudo-profundity. His haphazard attempts at poetic shading are finally boring, like his Chopin that doesn’t dance enough.

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