Kolesnikov and Tsoy: The amazing alchemy of two brains and two hearts
If you studied piano as a child, I bet you have a poignant piano duet memory or two. Maybe it made your first public performance just a little less stressful (you were sharing the piano bench with a familiar someone, after all!), or maybe it was how you first realized that you were capable of making “real” music, with a teacher filling in your careful, single melody line (Faber Piano Adventure method books, we’re appreciatively looking at you!). All through my elementary school years, I had a dedicated duet partner at my teacher’s studio, with countless compulsory four-hand events for one and two pianos on the annual calendar. What I remember even more vividly than the music, though, is the matching outfits our mothers put us in for each and every one of these. (It was the early nineties. It involved big bows, bold prints and appliqué.) And, yes, although I sometimes envied my string- and woodwind playing friends their orchestras and ensembles, there is something distinctly wonderful about sharing a keyboard. It’s at once small and big; intimate and collaborative.
This intimacy is exactly what inspires and excites the two extraordinary artists coming to Portland in January 2026: Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy. Not only are they partners in music-making; they’re partners in life. Ever since meeting as students at the Moscow Conservatory of Music, now living in London, they have found their musical synergy to be the foundation of something incredibly powerful and wonderfully organic. Always intentional, always thoughtfully engaging with each other and their audience, these two see their life’s work as one of the most difficult but also one of the most rewarding genres in existence. Where, outside of piano duets, do brilliant individuals get to share? (Two cooks sharing a stove? Two writers sharing a computer? Two tennis players sharing a racquet? Come on; don’t be ridiculous!) But that, in essence, is what a piano duo does!
“It’s a shared heart, a shared soul that you somehow need to magically achieve,” said Tsoy, in a 2024 interview with the New York Times (read the fantastic full interview here). “And that is something that can only come with years: with years of experience, and years of knowing and understanding each other.”
For a truly poignant behind-the-scenes glimpse into these two men and their extraordinary story, watch this video interview from the BBC World Service. I never knew, before this, that Kolesnikov narrowly escaped being drafted into the Russian army, or that Covid lockdown forced them to start sharing one piano, because their individual instruments were in different spaces!
Says Pavel Kolesnikov, of their collaboration on stage, and off: “There is something strange that is happening in this process. I will often compare it to some kind of alchemy, because it’s a process of merging in an intellectual, spiritual way with another person … It’s a hard and embarrassing process to go through …”
“A little bit like two plants growing in the same pot!” quips Samson Tsoy. Now there’s a metaphor every Portlandian understands – pianist or not!
When Kolesnikov and Tsoy take the stage in Portland next year, be ready for a program that will take you to the most intimate moments of Schubertian melancholy and the most dramatic crescendo’s of Rachmaninoffian rapture. You can buy tickets for their January 4th performance here.