In his review, Michael Church scratches his head but is ultimately won over by the adventurous Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy’s magical Schubert
Leonid Desyatnikov • Schubert
Schubert: Fantaisie in F minor; Divertissement à la hongroise; Leonid Desyatnikov: Trompe-l’œil
Pavel Kolesnikov, Samson Tsoy (piano)
Harmonia Mundi HMM902716 68:02 mins
Clip: Schubert’s Divertissement a la hongroise, D818, Op. 54 – III. Allegretto
An excellent work we rarely hear is Schubert’s four-hand Divertissement à la hongroise, based on a song the composer chanced to hear a Hungarian kitchen-maid singing as she worked in Count Esterházy’s palace. Gently modal and mildly exploratory, it gets bewitching treatment here by Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy.
But it’s not the primary spur for this album. That honour goes to Trompe-l’œil, written for this adventurous duo by the Ukrainian-born composer Leonid Desyatnikov, and here sandwiched between the aforesaid Divertissement and Schubert’s Fantasie in F minor.
Desyatnikov imagines his pieces as ‘the follow-up to – or rough draft of – Schubert’s Fantasie.’
Yes, Schubert’s motifs and gestures are all there, but scattered and caricatured in wrong-note form; it’s like seeing fragments of a much-loved tapestry surfacing then sinking from view in a sea of musical debris.
It all suggests an arduous – and rather tedious – experiment in search of a solution, which only arrives with the Fantaisie itself.
Having heard the premiere of this programme live, I am struck by how different it sounds on the album, and that is thanks to some weird sonic tinkering in the studio.
For the Desyatnikov, greeting cards were apparently placed ‘vertically’ on the strings to dampen the resonance, while for the Schubert, a silk scarf was placed on the strings.
All that’s beyond my humble ken, but in this recording the Schubert works emerge as absolutely magical.
The Divertissement elicits a sumptuous softness, while the Fantaisie creates the impression of vast and intensely dramatic landscapes. Michael Church