Reviews of the recital at the Rheingau Musik Festival (25.07.2024)

🔷 Frankfurter Allgemeine / Piano recital with Alexander Malofeev in the Rheingau.

Alexander Malofev understood the early Prelude in C-Sharp Minor, which is still considered one of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s most popular piano pieces, as music of fading reverberation. At the piano recital at Schloss Johannisberg of this pianist, who was born in Moscow in 2001, the piece did not resound in isolation, as is so often the case, but in the context of the five “Morceaux de fantasie”, op. 3, which Rachmaninoff had composed at the age of 19. In Malofeev’s concert at the Rheingau Music Festival, the mist over these pieces, which include an unpretentiously catchy “Mélodie” as well as a metrically floating “Sérénade”, was pleasantly cleared in the salon: this was thanks to the pianist’s clearly contoured playing, full of nuance of touch, which allowed the chimes of the prelude to fade away for so long that even this powerful music targeted silence.

Rachmaninoff’s Fantasy Pieces were the only original work for the modern concert grand in Malofeev’s nevertheless pianistically immensely rich and stylistically wide-ranging programme, in which the romanticising view of Handel’s Harpsichord Suite No. 1 in B-Flat Major, HVW 434, with its highly ornate “Aria” variations, was most likely a matter of taste. In any case, the 1929 piano arrangement by Ukrainian virtuoso Samuel Feinberg of Bach’s Organ Concerto in A Minor, BWV 593, which, in turn, adapted a prototype by Vivaldi, makes no claim to authenticity with respect to its Baroque predecessor. In a highly controlled manner, with exactingness and rigour in tempo and with pithily sustained, never ostentatious, forte playing, Malofeev was able to reconstruct how the adaptation took on a life of its own to become this independent version, which expands the piano sound to orchestral density and chromaticity.

By imitating and imagining other instruments, Malofeev offered another way of making their use superfluous in his view of Frédéric Chopin’s set of Andante spianato and Grande polonaise brillante in E-flat major, op. 22. The fact that it is legitimate to omit the orchestral accompaniment composed for the polonaise, as Chopin kept open as a possibility, was attested by the pianist by him opening up many associations in this regard, with proud wind fanfares as well as rousing strings. With respect to two adaptations from Richard Wagner’s operas, the question as to whether Franz Liszt’s versions amount to a reduction of the original did not arise. Just as Alexander Malofeev had already played “Elsa’s Dream” from “Lohengrin”, with vocal phrasing and the sharp tone of a lied, he conveyed the value of the independence of the transcription. Pianistically surging and full of energy, yet distinctive and tonally highly graduated, the overture to the opera “Tannhäuser” resounded in utter triumph over all pianistic limits. It came off with such perfect technique and in such a musically dazzling fashion that the applause demanded three encores. These came from Scriabin, Prokofiev and Purcell.

By Axel Zibulski, 26 July 2024

🔷 Frankfurter Rundschau / Pianist Malofeev in the Rheingau – The great creator of colour.

Pianist Alexander Malofeev with an impressive programme in the Rheingau. Alexander Malofeev made his debut in 2017 at the age of 15 at the Rheingau Music Festival in Wiesbaden’s Kurhaus with Sergei Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto, shortly after winning the International Tchaikovsky Competition for Young Musicians. Now, at Schloss Johannisberg in the Rheingau, the Moscow native offered a broad programmatic and articulatory spectrum, ranging from baroque intonation to the tonal excessiveness of Franz Liszt.

All this on the grand piano, which optimally proved its worth in the clear and catchy style of the 22-year-old, with his ability to help pre-classical music attain a lively and distinctive physicality. Georg Friedrich Handel’s Suite in B-Flat Major, HWV 434, sounded elaborated and free of any restrictions of technical monoculture – instrumental contemporaneity that attracted attention and showed the pianist to be a great creator of colour and expression.

With the piano version of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Concerto in A Minor, BWV 593, it was also possible, thanks to Malofeev, to experience a rarity of Russian Soviet bringing to life of early music. Samuil Feinberg is known to us only as a dreaded super-complexer in his piano sonatas, thanks to a few, very courageous performers. A kind of revenant of Ferruccio Busoni who, just like the latter, embraced the origin of his craft, namely Bach, in Moscow and Leningrad with burning expression and had become active here.

This trouvaille, which alone would have been worth the concert visit, was followed by a showpiece by Frédéric Chopin: the furor of ornamentation in “Andante spinato et Grande polonaise brillante in E-flat major, op. 22” offered this Polish dance pattern with the most exciting of dynamics and figurative dazzle – this was virtuosically relieved of all dance realism.

The pianist as a master-builder.

After the five “Morceaux de fantaisie, op. 3” by Sergei Rachmaninoff, which represent something like the memento of his loss of his Russian homeland and which were rendered with great subtlety, the concert closed with Franz Liszt’s piano version of “Elsa’s Dream” from 1854, from the opera “Lohengrin”. This was followed, in conclusion, by the concert paraphrase of the “Tannhäuser” overture from 1848. The Fürst-von-Metternich-Saal served as a resonance chamber for Tannhäuser’s attempt to extricate himself from the Venusberg Grotto, at the centre of which stood the concert grand as a libidinous battlefield, and the pianist as master builder. The audience broke out in cheers.

By Bernhard Uske, 26 July 2024