Pavel Kolesnikov

Pavel Kolesnikov

Piano

Representation: Benelux

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

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Pavel is BOZAR's Portrait Artist for 2026/27. His Brussels residency includes solo, chamber and multimedia projects across the season, as well as a concerto with the Belgian National Orchestra. Elsewhere, Pavel performs with the City of Birmingham Symphony, Bergen Philharmonic, BBC Philharmonic, The Hallé, Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana and Adelaide Symphony, collaborating with Sir Mark Elder, David Danzmayr and Ludovic Morlot. He also gives solo recitals at London’s Southbank Centre and Wigmore Hall, Amsterdam’s Muziekgebouw and at Musikfestspiele Potsdam.

Highlights of the previous three seasons include concertos with the London Symphony Orchestra, Danish National Symphony, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Yomiuri Nippon Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Philharmonia Orchestra, Atlanta Symphony and Netherlands Philharmonic, alongside Susanna Mälkki, Nathalie Stutzmann, Manfred Honeck, Sir Edward Gardner, Alpesh Chauhan, Adam Hickox, Alexander Bloch and Vasily Petrenko. He also gave recitals at Atlanta’s Spivey Hall, New York’s 92NY, Klavier-Festival Ruhr and the Severance Music Center as part of the Cleveland Orchestra’s Piano Series.

Pavel is known for his curatorial approach and work across genres. His realisation of Bach’s Goldberg Variations with dancer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker has been staged over fifty times across Europe, while his residency at the 2023 Aldeburgh Festival saw collaborations with architect Sophie Hicks and playwright Martin Crimp. In 2025 David Hockney invited Pavel, along with his partner and fellow pianist Samson Tsoy, to curate a series of concerts inspired by the artist’s life and work at the Fondation Louis Vuitton.

March 2026 saw the 2nd edition of the Amsterdam Ragged Music festival, which is curated by Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy at the Muziekgebouw aan het IJ Amsterdam. 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”.

Harmonia Mundi will release their 3rd duo CD in January 2027.

Until 2023 Kolesnikov recorded 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.

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Highlights 2026-27

30 October, Release solo CD Harmonia Mundi: Complete Chopin Nocturnes

7 November, Pavel will perform the album programme live at BOZAR in Brussels in a special release concert. The event also marks the beginning of his residency at BOZAR as Portrait Artist. https://www.bozar.be/nl/kalender/pavel-kolesnikov

13 November, Bristol, complete Chopin Nocturnes

30 December, Wigmore Hall London, recital with Tchaikovsky’s Seasons

February 2027, BOZAR, Belgian National Orchestra Michael Schønwandt (conductor), Saint-Saëns: Piano Concerto No. 2

Apr 2027, RNCM, Manchester, BBC Philharmonic - a program with Britten: Young Apollo, Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 9 and Adams: Eros Piano

Apr 2027 Symphony Hall, Birmingham, City of Birmingham Symphony & David Danzmayr - Saint-Saëns: Piano Concerto No. 2

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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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