Samson Tsoy

We open our lunchtime concert season with a duo of top pianists. London-based pianists Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy browse through this four-hand repertoire and consolidate their love of Stravinsky and Schubert. Even without percussion or choreography, Stravinsky's piano version of Le sacre du printemps for four hands remains an expressionist masterpiece. Stravinsky may have enlisted the help of Debussy for the piano reduction. The Russian shin-kicker and French melody-surfer both together on one keyboard. An extraordinary picture! Schubert, on the other hand, cut a solitary figure in a remote Hungarian village when he wrote most of his four-hand compositions. He taught the two daughters of Count Esterhazy there. His Fantasy in F minor offered the sisters their necessary studying. Pavel Kolesnikov en Samson Tsoy Kolesnikov and Tsoy have worked and lived together since their student days. Kolesnikov won the Honens Piano Competition at the age of 23 and Tsoy was a laureate of the 2012 Santander Paloma O’Shea International Piano Competition. They performed as a duo in renowned venues such as the Wigmore Hall, the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam, Carnegie Hall in New York and the Konzerthaus in Berlin. In addition to their activities as pianists, they co-founded the Ragged Music Festival (London) in 2019, which offers artists the opportunity to engage in dialogue with music, architecture and the visual arts. Pavel has fond memories of his performance in Leuven with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s The Goldberg Variations (2023) and now returns with works by Schubert and Stravinsky. > Franz Schubert, Fantasia in F minor, D. 940, Op. 103 > Igor Stravinsky, Le sacre du printemps (original version for piano four hands)