Chopin Nocturnes

Pavel Kolesnikov plays the complete Chopin Nocturnes at the Playhouse on Saturday 14 November, his Music in the Round debut. It's a long one: the whole set runs around two hours and 50 minutes, with two intervals to break it up.

If you're not familiar with the nocturnes, they're Chopin's night pieces — the slow, lyrical, atmospheric ones. Playing the complete set in one go is a bit of a marathon, and it's exactly what Kolesnikov is bringing to the Playhouse. He's a young pianist who's been getting a lot of attention lately, and Bachtrack has called him 'a poet of the piano'. He's known for taking familiar repertoire and finding a way to cast new light on it, which is a good thing to have on your side when you're working through a cycle as well-known as this one.

There's a bit more to the praise, too. One review described him as 'a pianist whose name is rapidly becoming synonymous with searching originality, rhetorical aptness and kinaesthetic authority'. That last bit is a fancy way of saying he's got a real command of the instrument, and the 'searching originality' suggests he's not just playing the notes as they're usually heard. If you've heard the nocturnes a hundred times before, that's the kind of thing that makes a full recital worth sitting through.

It's a Music in the Round concert, so it's part of their regular season here in Sheffield. The performance starts at 7pm, and with those two intervals, you're looking at nearly three hours of Chopin. If you're planning your evening, keep that in mind — it's a proper night of music, not a quick stop-in.