In the west Texan desert, survival is the first art form. The landscape’s expansive nothingness, its refusal to provide for us forces a sort of ritualized humility in those who pass through. The effort required simply to survive here becomes the foundation for any other act of creation.

Against this stark backdrop, begins the lavish weekend I’m embarking on as a guest of Ballroom Marfa, a contemporary art museum established in Marfa, Texas in 2003. Ever-ambitious, the Ballroom Marfa team partnered (mostly through fate and a social network spanning multiple continents) with the widely acclaimed, London-based piano duo, Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy. Together, they created a three-day residency of musical installations deeply inspired by the desert setting. Across three late September nights, guests could attend up to five performances at various sites across Marfa, as well as a live discussion between the boys (as they’re adoringly referred to by Ballroom’s inner circle) and Lawrence Weschler, the legendary cultural reporter and author.

“A desert of pure feeling,” Weschler recalled late Saturday morning. He was referencing a quote from Russian artist Kazimir Malevich who once used the phrase to describe his white cube on a white background. That’s what we’re met with in Marfa—a space so open it swallows projection, reflecting everything back at you. And something like the awkward impulse to talk too much just because someone else won’t, the desert tempts you to pour yourself into it, simply because it does not resist.

“We often in classical music have this conversation about what is the role of us, of performers,” Kolesnikov explained to me, his dirty blonde head cocking slightly in his thoughtfulness. “Whether we just recreate the music, or we create a new art form.” I suppose that’s what we’re all here to find out. What will the desert yield to us today? Can it be made new? Can we? 

Until this weekend, I’d never set foot in Texas. After three hours of driving through a stark, desolate stretch from the Midland airport into the high desert, I wasn’t entirely sure I ever would again. But, against the odds, (AKA the blinking warning: Consider taking a break on the dashboard of my rented Hyundai Sonata) 180 miles later, I arrived in Marfa: the greenest desert I’ve ever seen.

That’s the funny thing about Marfa, as I came to know it over four days: it is but it isn’t. It is in Texas, but it isn’t really Texas, at least not according to many of its part-time residents. It is jokingly called a “drinking town,” but most everyone drank mocktails at lunch or took polite sips of their champagne during performances. It is ethereal, much like a mirage, but its landscape is severe. It is locked in time and yet, this weekend, the bounds of my somewhat rigid reality were loosened by a genuine closeness to the sublime, 100% induced by the musical mastery of Samson Tsoy and Pavel Kolesnikov. 

Kolesnikov (b. 1989 in Siberia) and Tsoy (b. 1988 in Kazakhstan) are among the most celebrated pianists of their generation, known not only for their technical brilliance and daring four-hand interpretations of famous works, but for the rare electricity of their partnership, which is both musical and romantic. Apart, they are each individually acclaimed and incredibly accomplished. But together, the intimacy and earnestness of their partnership collides with the vastness of the music itself, as well as their performance setting in Marfa. 

Each of the five performances was honored by the care with which it was constructed, the way it was placed in our reality. Ballroom Marfa expertly balanced the sanctity of the art with the high production value of the events themselves. From a Frito pie intermission on Friday evening, to open bars set up (and torn down without a trace) in the middle of the desert, they managed to complement the mastery of Tsoy and Kolesnikov.  

“It’s entirely its own place,” one attendee insisted of the desert town. And, while I can’t claim to know anything about the “real” Texas, I have a feeling she’s right. Maybe it’s the Marfa lights—strange, unexplained orbs of light that can be seen sometimes at night, dancing along the desert expanse. Maybe it’s the mineral-rich mountains encircling the town, their stores of crystal and stone radiating something otherworldly. Whatever the source, sitting beneath the heaviest, widest sky I’ve ever seen, I felt as though I’d landed not in Texas, but on another planet.

The celebratory “Stardust Opening” to the weekend was one of the most profound musical experiences of my life. I pulled up to what looked like a small wedding. Rows of folding wood chairs flanking a neat aisle. A modest wooden stage glowing under string lights and the last rays of sun. However, instead of an altar, there were two gleaming pianos. Just before the musicians took the stage, I overheard a woman confess that she had travelled all around the world to hear them play. “Their touch is velvet,” she cooed, before shutting her program and furiously clapping as they took their seats on the makeshift stage. 

As Tsoy and Kolesnikov tore ferociously through a near two-hour program, which included works spanning multiple centuries from Beethoven to Chopin to Prokofiev, I shuddered with the realization that this could never be recreated. Even the clouds had convened in the just right way that they obscured the cosmos above—theatrically, coyly—while still allowing for a breathtaking sunset. The moment could never be done justice with a video or even an article. At once fleeting and perpetually affecting.

“You need performers who bring [the music] to life, and bring it to life with their own imagination, how they see themselves,” Kolesnikov explained to me when we finally sat down together on Friday afternoon. The pair has a unique ability not only to bring the music to life, but also to translate the great works of the last 500 years into something that feels timeless and modern. “With the sonic experience,” Tsoy continued, “we wanted to turn people's attention to how we listen.” 

That emphasis on listening stayed with me, especially when, the following day, the boys spoke with Lawrence Weschler about the ways music can bend time. They talked about the interaction between temporal time and divine time, or God’s time, as they put it. As I see it, there’s temporality—in this case, the finite cleaving of time into before you heard their music and after you heard their music. Or even the physical score itself, which has an obvious beginning and an end. And then there’s eternity—perhaps the rarest mortal experience we can have, of being released from time itself, unaware of its passing. It is a state usually reserved for encounters with the sublime, when we feel ourselves released, however briefly, into something infinite.

On the last day of their residency, Tsoy and Kolesnikov performed both: Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen in the late morning, a collection of seven movements composed for two pianos, and, later that evening, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, a thundering, propulsive piece of music that defined 20th century music. Visions de l’Amen, as the name suggests, reflects Messiaen’s Catholic mysticism and his fascination with eternity. Each movement circles around themes of creation, death, judgment, and grace. Structurally, the piece resists straightforward linear progression: motives return, expand, and dissolve, creating the sense of an ever-present “Amen.” 

The morning performance was held in Ballroom’s newly restored Bullroom—a defunct cattle auction house, transformed into a space of unlikely reverence. From the road, the building appears derelict, easy to miss were it not for staff in bright pink hats ushering guests inside. But indoors, the place thrummed with history: corrugated metal that once rang with the rhythmic bellow of an auctioneer, now vibrated with hymn. And as we listened, prayerfully, glorious beams of light broke through the metal slats of the roof.

Rite of Spring, by contrast, is a study in temporality. Its jagged polyrhythms and relentless drive force the listener into an acute awareness of time’s progression. “[Stravinsky] had this cool mind, but he had a volcano in his heart [as Ingmar Bergman put it]. And that is what makes a great artist, when you are able to connect intellectually and move people's lives upside down. Great art is found at that intersection,” Kolesnikov says to me. 

On the final night of the residency, it seemed as though the whole town of Marfa gathered under an impossibly clear night sky to witness the boys play. One piano placed in the center of Haroon Mirza’s Stone Circle. I almost couldn’t take it seriously at first—how cinematic it all was—and then, like some taunting cosmic gift, the brightest shooting star I could imagine streaked across the black sky. 

While most of the weekend’s events were ticketed, it was obvious through talking with Ballroom’s Executive Director Holly Harrison how much responsibility and gratitude they feel for the local community of Marfans. On Saturday night, Ballroom welcomed anyone who wanted to attend the Rite of Spring performance for free. Their staff carefully guided each attendee through the black night to the Stone Circle, where the boys played for the final time in Marfa. 

The beauty of this communal gathering is crystallized by Tsoy himself, who explained to me, “Classical music is a very unique art object. It's been written by composers hundreds of years ago, and it's been written now, but it will never exist [or be accessible] for most people without performance, without something that we bring [to them]. Because it just exists on paper.” The two musicians regard music itself as something physical—their own cathedral of sound. 

“Music has to be placed in the reality in a certain way to be experienced. It cannot be just thrown in,” Kolesnikov tells me, his partner nodding. And indeed, nothing about this weekend felt “just thrown in” (save perhaps the astronomical interventions). Even the physical labor of placing a piano (or two) in the middle of the desert is not lost on them. They know exactly what they’re doing—even when they’re employing some armchair physics in order to build their cathedral correctly.

Tsoy continued to muse thoughtfully about the performance of Rite with me, sharing, “We will reactivate the stones with the music, and we actually call this concert Dance of Earth, which is the last movement of the first part of the Rite of Spring, because it will be, in a way, a dance of Earth. And a celebration,” swiftly adding, “though the story of the ballet is very wild.” 

By the end of the weekend, what lingered most for me was not only the music itself but the boys’ profound connection to it. Kolesnikov told me, “[Playing the Rite of Spring] is physically so difficult. The story, of course, is about this girl who is made to dance until she dies, sacrificed. But this is how you feel as a performer playing it on one piano. Every time we arrive at the last pages of the Rite of Spring, we are not quite sure that we are going to be able to finish the piece.” Physically exhausting, emotionally overwhelming, almost sacrificial. And yet it is precisely in that extremity, in surrendering body and spirit to the score, that their performances seem to mirror the sites themselves. Tsoy added, “The piano being placed right in the middle, in that circle, creates the pagan narrative of the Rite of Spring, and people are watching you being crucified on this piano with four hands.” 

Pilgrims. That’s what some of the frequent visitors to Marfa called themselves. They worship beauty, and they come to the desert to worship freely. To talk at length about the art they are witnessing, to critique it, to revel in the uniqueness of their experience before clocking out of God’s time and returning to their primary coastal homes. Pavel and Samson, having survived their crucifixion, return each time to a piano as to His body broken open just for them. Flesh or wood, hand or key, this is how they channel the miracle, how great composers “speak through them.”