CD Feature/ Oksana Kolesnikova: "Oksana"

May 10th 2006, by Tobias |

You may disagree with what she does , but you can’t deny that she does it extremely convincingly.

First of all: Can you imagine a Classical piano record unafraid of hitting the wrong keys? We’ve become so accustomed to “perfection” that the mere presence of a grain of dust causes profound irritation. While all artists seem to concur that a public performance needs adrenalin, boldness and an undaunting attitude, their record companies more than often reduce them to puppets on a string, allowed only those movements absolutely necessary and within the safe boundaries of common opinion. If you’re afraid of listening to someone with a mind of her own, then don’t read on.

Second of all: Can you imagine listening to those well-known masterpieces with a new feeling of excitment and freshness? We’ve gone to lengths asking Classical performers if they felt that everything had already been done before and whether they truly thought it necessary recording the same pieces over and over again. In a sense, this record is the direct answer to that question. If you discount Michael Oginsky and Muzio Clementi, who only make brief appearances, this is the typical core repertoire of Piano music – yet it sounds like something different alltogether. Whether she freely toys with the tempi in her Chopin in a breathtaking stop-and-go, creates an intricate aural picture by painting in rectangular motion (Tchaikovsky’s “Atumn Song”) or lets Debussy’s “First Arabesque” float like a leaf in the morning breeze, Oksana Kolesnikova allows these compositions to be whatever they want to be in that particular instant – just never boring or mediocre. For sure, if more of her colleagues would play as powerful as she does in some of the virtuoso-showcases, there would not be any backseat-sleeping any more. One can’t help but feel that with this effort, she wipes away the usual distance between an “interpretation” and the “intention of the composer”. You may disagree with what she does , but you can’t deny that she does it extremely convincingly.

Third of all: Can you imagine all of this taking place during an small-scale family party, never intended to appear on CD? Recorded back in the year 2000, these tracks feed off that combination of intimacy and everything-goes. The point is not to avoid those grains of dust, but rather to go on a journey and hit the spot. And if it feels as good as this, those were the right keys after all.

By Tobias Fischer

Homepage: Oksana Kolesnikova