Review of the concert at the Orpheum Theatre (13.09.2025) / 1st Tchaikovsky with Otto Tausk and the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra

🔷 Vancouver Sun / Electrifying performance by Alexander Malofeev launches VSO season.

The young pianist’s sound is immense and powerful, his tone dark and rich or lithe and sparkling as required
The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra began the 2025-26 season — its 107th — at the Orpheum Theatre Friday night, with a brilliant launch for what may well be a challenging moment for our orchestra.

… The same could be said of the performance of Tchaikovsky’s B flat major piano concerto. Except that given young Alexander Malofeev as the soloist, no one cared in the slightest. We hear this concerto rendered far too frequently by pianists who provide little more than serviceable readings of the extravagant music, but Malofeev’s all-or-nothing style was electrifying. His sound is immense and powerful, his tone dark and rich or lithe and sparkling as required. His dynamic range alone is extraordinary. And in solo passages, his sense of rhythmic freedom allows his audience to cherish Tchaikovsky’s extraordinary lyric moments. COVID, and then international music politics, forced us to wait a bit to enjoy Malofeev live; he’s been well worth the delays, as a wildly enthusiastic house demonstrated.

There was, of course, an encore — Mikhail Pletnev’s piano transcription of the great Pas de deux from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, as thrilling and as emotional as anything the Russian master conceived for orchestra, but rendered here by ten fingers on two hands. What a ride! An encore worth the price of admission all on its own.

By David Gordon Duke, September 14, 2025