Interview, Pavel Kolesnikov on Couperin

Following his arresting accounts of Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons and Chopin Mazurkas (which was shortlisted for a Gramophone Award in 2017), Russian pianist Pavel Kolesnikov has stepped back a couple of centuries for his third recording on Hyperion to explore the keyboard music of Louis Couperin. I spoke to him about the project shortly before his Wigmore Hall recital last week, which included Couperin’s Le Tombeau de M de Blancrocher as well as music by Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Debussy and Lachenmann.

In terms of repertoire, this album is a bit of a change of direction from your previous recordings: tell me a little about what initially sparked your interest in the French baroque, and how it’s developed over the past few years…

My first meaningful encounter with French baroque happened when Teodor Currentzis came to my native Novosibirsk in 2004, to start his orchestra MusicAeterna. I was introduced to this exotic circle and even played violin in the orchestra very briefly. I was mesmerised by him, and by the whole world of historical and historically-informed performance. We listened to many different recordings - between ourselves and sometimes with maestro; I remember particularly well Trevor Pinnock's Rameau and some astonishing French recordings of Il Giardino Armonico. I was exposed to the baroque virus!

Around the same time I heard Sokolov playing Rameau and François Couperin in Venice - and so I learned there was no problem with doing this music on a contemporary piano. A bit later I found out that there was, indeed, a problem. Now, again, I come to the conclusion that this problem is hugely overrated. Simply, as with other things of considerable age, it doesn't hurt to pay extra care when handling baroque repertoire - and French in particular, as it is very, very fine in some respects.

I think it is important, when doing baroque music on piano, to approach it with double attentiveness and sensitivity, but with not a single cliché to apply. You need to hear it completely fresh, and in a way allow it to lead you in the direction it wants. For this music certainly has to be reinvented in some ways - I like to compare this process to translation of a poem from one language to another. And as with translation, one rarely can afford to be literal and slavishly follow the original to achieve a result that is any good.

You recorded this disc on a Yamaha grand: what special qualities of the music come to the fore as a result, and was the instrument modified at all?

We didn't modify the instrument itself in any way. The particular instrument that I've chosen has a very intense, emotional, slightly nasal sound. It feels a little bit as if the tension of the string itself is carried in the sound very well - I called it, half-jokingly, "the Amy sound". We used a slightly stretched tuning - with treble tuned a bit sharp and base quite flat - to make the verticals vibrate more. And then of course we had to work hard with the sound engineer to catch the soul of this sound in the microphones.

Yamaha pianos are typically very sensitive, which makes them particularly wonderful in the recording studio. They also sometimes have this lucky combination of clear yet singing tone. All of this allowed me to bring to the fore the emotional intensity and the astonishing colours of these pieces, without making them overweight. I also had in mind a subtle play on the diverse vocal, lute and orchestral qualities of this music - this was partly the reason for using two different actions with this piano, one slightly more articulated and another one more mellow and dark-toned.

In the trailer for the album you mention how deeply these pieces are influenced by lute music – could you point to two or three particular figurations (or specific movements) where this really comes to the fore?

It is not even that they are influenced by lute - they have lute roots, they stem from lute. The very polyphony and distribution of voices in most pieces speaks of that very immediate ancestry, of plucking the string in a more sensual way than what happens inside a harpsichord: perhaps less so in the A major suite, but listen to Courante in G minor or Tombeau de Mr Blancrocher! And the unmeasured preludes, of course.

This lute connection, by the way, is itself a strong argument for me in favour of doing these pieces on piano, because with its wide dynamic range and a softer sound attack the lute is in some way even closer to the piano than the harpsichord.

We know almost nothing about how the composer originally grouped these pieces – how did you come to a decision on the running-order for the recording?

We don't know how exactly the pieces were arranged in the suites, it is true, although we know how the suite was usually built in a certain period. However, I was only a little concerned with historical correctness; I stayed with the approximate grouping of a baroque suite, but mostly was aiming to create a distinctive dramatic line, both within suites and through the whole CD. This explains some oddities, such as an impossible C minor Gigue in G minor suite, or an unlikely additional A minor Sarabande in A major suite.

The running order of a CD is always a thing of a great importance for me. Even though I know that one rarely listens to the entire CD in one sitting, as in a concert, I strongly feel that a CD should in principle work as a structure. In the case of Couperin, I was aiming for a highly immersive and slightly "rough" listening experience. The structure "hangs" on the larger pieces as if on pillars; those pieces also bear an extraordinary emotional charge, while the smaller pieces between them are mostly more subtle.

How do you approach the unmeasured preludes: is it the kind of thing that you can research, or does it really come down to intuition?

Deciphering a prelude requires understanding of the style and its spirit, a certain academic knowledge, and an ability to follow the inner logic of music. There is an argument over the degree of the fidelity of unmeasured notation: does it leave something unspecified, or it actually gives you all the clues? I am convinced that this kind of notation must be rather emotional by nature and therefore an autograph must carry much more information than a copy, let alone a contemporary printed score. But in the case of Louis Couperin we don't have an autograph surviving!

What is very clear is that these pieces ask for the performer's freedom and full immersion in the musical text...and yet, they are exactly that - a text. An actor declaiming a soliloquy may seem to have endless ways to do it; yet the choices are somehow limited by the meaning and even more so by the structure, syntax and phonetics of the language.

Especially when performed on a concert grand, much of this music sounds almost disconcertingly modern: to what extent do you feel that Couperin was ahead of his time, and do you ever sense his influence in later French keyboard writing?

It is highly unlikely that Couperin had a direct influence on any composer except for those immediately associated with him: his pieces weren't published in his lifetime and for a few centuries were tucked away in two manuscripts, one of which was only discovered in the 1950s. At the same time (being one of the most celebrated composers of his day, and undoubtedly one of the most strikingly original of the whole French baroque) he did indeed influence the development of French harpsichord school strongly. We shouldn't forget that when Couperin was writing and performing his music, it was considered resolutely modern; it certainly raised a few eyebrows. As a performer I see my foremost duty in resuscitating it - not as a historical curiosity, but as something that lives at this very moment, fresh and ready to surprise, touch or wound. That for me is a miracle of performance.