Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy make a charming and thoughtful duo – in person as well as at the piano. Outwardly at least, Tsoy is open and gregarious, more likely to neatly encapsulate an idea, while Kolesnikov is reserved and reactive, more likely to construct a detailed, well-structured response. During our conversation, at Yamaha in London, the two pianists respond as much to each other as to me.

We are here to talk about Schubert’s great F minor Fantasie, D940, one of the miraculous works written in the final year of the composer’s short life. As a genre, piano duets have a reputation for being more fun to play than to listen to, domestic music written for amateurs or to play with students or friends. Schubert composed many such duets, but he also wrote several with genuinely great music, and two of these are included on Kolesnikov’s and Tsoy’s first album together for Harmonia Mundi: the Divertissement à la hongroise, D818, and the Fantasie in F minor, D940. In between comes a new piece, Trompe-l’œil by Leonid Desyatnikov written for Kolesnikov and Tsoy, a 20-minute reflection on Schubert’s Fantasie, which is placed before it and casts its shadow over the main work.

I ask whether there is a friction in performing Schubert’s Fantasie in public, a work of such privacy, intimacy and ultimately anguish. Kolesnikov’s response is typically probing: ‘This, strangely, is one of Schubert’s most open works and one of the most flexible things you can play: you can play it just for yourselves, or you can play it in a big hall, even though it is very intimate. What makes the Fantasie so special is that this private, powerful, emotional piece is played by two people. When solo piano music has such an intimate character, it is as if the pianist is in dialogue with something – whether with something above [God or heaven] or with the audience. With the Fantasie, it’s as if the music is private but people are invited.’

Kolesnikov continues: ‘With the piano duet, unlike other forms of ensemble playing, you literally share one instrument. Whereas with other forms of ensemble everyone has their own distinct part, with the piano duet you don’t really have that – it’s not really polyphonic. You need to achieve a uniform sound, uniform touch, uniform breathing, on an instrument that is very precise and that makes any disagreement very obvious. It’s a slightly transcendental thing. The intimacy of the Fantasie is amplified by the fact that there are two people playing as if they are one.’

The sharing of a single instrument is a key characteristic of the piano duet. With a single instrument, the two pianists share not only a single keyboard but a single set of pedals. So who is responsible for pedalling? ‘That’s a secret,’ says Tsoy with a gentle laugh. I assume he means that he doesn’t want it to be known who is playing the top and bottom parts (this is not listed in the booklet, as they switch between pieces). ‘No, no,’ Tsoy interjects, ‘not that sort of secret – in the Fantasie, I play the top part, but throughout we change who pedals, depending on who needs it more and how helpful is it for each of us to have control of the pedal.’ This strikes me as highly unusual. ‘This is not something that we have invented,’ says Kolesnikov. ‘I know there is a tradition, something we’re always taught, that the player of the bottom part always takes the pedal, but this is something that Maria João Pires suggested to us. We swap; it depends on how the pedal is working in a particular moment.’

Presumably this takes a lot of rehearsal – something that Kolesnikov and Tsoy, as partners in life as well as at the piano, can thankfully accommodate. ‘In that sense we were very lucky with Covid,’ says Tsoy. ‘We played four-hand music before but not as much. But during Covid you weren’t allowed to play with anyone else. We have two grand pianos at home but they are in separate rooms, so all the repertory we did together was on one piano.’ Kolesnikov picks up the thread: ‘It is very difficult to explain how it is done, even to yourself. Whenever you are playing, you are listening closely. You have to listen not to yourself but to the whole thing, and find your place in the whole, which can be very surprising because your perception changes hugely when you start listening in this way. There is this idea that playing piano duets involves a sacrifice, but I don’t think this arises if you find this right approach. It is very rewarding, and also very strange – you become less concerned with yourself and your part and more fully switched on to the whole. There is not one person following another, but both of you are following something that appears like a projection of the two.’ ‘In a way you become like a conductor, but a conductor who is playing,’ concludes Tsoy.

Kolesnikov and Tsoy begin the Fantasie unusually slowly. This is clearly a result of the way it emerges from Desyatnikov’s Trompe-l’œil, the new work based on the Fantasie that has clearly had an impact on the pianists’ approach to the Schubert. ‘Tempo is such a subjective and relative quality,’ says Kolesnikov. ‘We should never talk about tempo in an isolated manner, because it hugely depends on the context, on the quality of the sound and the acoustic. There is a kind of progression through this album where the sound becomes increasingly physical, and it is most dense in the Fantasie, which of course influences the tempo.’

Schubert’s opening tempo is Allegro molto moderato – a typically vague Schubertian marking that invokes character as much as tempo. Our conversation of how to interpret this leads Kolesnikov to a more general observation: ‘I think we have to be very careful of the illusion of certainty that any score gives. I maintain that the most important things are not written in the score, that it is impossible to write them in the score, and they have to be found mostly by intuition and common sense, and by understanding the idiom. Another thing I believe is that essentially there is no right and wrong in art. It is always a question of whether things are convincing – impressive, touching, impactful and so on. If that happens, then that’s great. If it doesn’t work, then it doesn’t really matter whether you follow a metronome mark or if you play a dotted rhythm correctly.’

When I jokingly respond that this seems to undermine any attempt I might make to root our discussion more firmly in the score, Kolesnikov clarifies that they are always happy to talk about specifics but the answer will probably be the same. As if to illustrate his point that not only does a score not tell you everything but can sometimes send you down a wrong path, he picks up my copy and finds the beginning of the Allegro vivace section (bar 164; the beginning of track 7 on their album). Schubert marks this forte, but there are almost no further instructions. ‘This indication can dictate that this first beat is very powerful,’ Kolesnikov begins. ‘But if you play this forte on the first beat, your whole phrase will stagnate. It doesn’t work. Of course the indication tells you there is a general level of volume, but in fact what you need to do is to start the phrase quite lightly. The score is not wrong, but it is provoking you to do something that is fundamentally wrong. In order to shape this phrase you need to forget about this first forte. Things like this happen a lot in every score, particularly in Schubert. It took us so long to figure out what was wrong with this phrase.’

It’s impossible to talk about Schubert’s F minor Fantasie and not mention the ending, where the opening theme returns but is cut short, with a brutally abrupt coda that collapses in minor-key despair. There is nothing else like it in the duet repertoire. ‘Emotionally it takes everything out of you,’ says Tsoy. ‘It’s so dark, it cannot get any darker.’ Kolesnikov continues: ‘When you get to the end of this piece in concert you don’t know what to do. That phrase is so incredibly pessimistic. You really don’t know what to do. Everything feels wrong. Sitting there feels very silly. Getting up and bowing feels very silly. It’s a very uncomfortable moment. The inevitability of life is all in that phrase.’

This feature originally appeared in the July 2024 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue of the world's leading classical music magazine – subscribe to Gramophone today