Hahn Hall / Santa Barbara, CA, USA (24.01.2025)

🔷 Los Angeles Times / Review: Here comes the next generation of virtuoso pianists.

Russian pianist Alexander Malofeev in recital at Hahn Hall, Music Academy of the West, Jan. 24, 2025.

… Alexander Malofeev, 23, who makes a monumentally thunderous impression with his music. For their local appearances, Malofeev played a recital in the Music Academy of the West’s Hahn Hall as part of the UC Santa Barbara Arts & Lectures series… Malofeev, now 23, can become a keyboard demon. He appears elfish and shy as he approaches his instrument. Once seated, though, his body bends to the keys as if in command of the piano’s power. His intensity overwhelms…

Born in Moscow, Malofeev captured attention winning first prize at the 2014 International Tchaikovsky Competition for Young Musicians, becoming a recognized prodigy throughout Russia. In the nearly three years since he moved to the West, he has risen up the professional circuit. Daniel Barenboim has been a champion. He made his L.A. debut with the Pasadena Symphony in 2023. Last summer he appeared with the L.A. Phil at the Hollywood Bowl.

Hearing Malofeev in the intimate but not claustrophobic Hahn Hall acoustic, however, brought out new dimensions. For the first half, he joined three otherworldly impromptus — Drei Klavierstücke, Opus 946 — written in Schubert’s last months with the Third Sonata by the neglected Soviet composer Dmitri Kabalevsky. The sonata from 1947 celebrates the end of a world war and sublimates the war’s lasting pain, and that fit surprisingly well with Schubert’s dramatic outbursts of existential terror that fade into an emptiness filled with sublime lyricism.
There is no surface to Malofeev’s playing. He tests the deepness of each phrase, warranted or not. It’s exhausting to listen to him, each impromptu, each sonata movement, becoming a draining experience of energetic power overcoming grave pessimism. Kabalevsky succumbed to Stalin’s decrees against formalistic art, and he has never been taken seriously in the West. Malofeev, though, found a riveting, antiwar core to the sonata otherwise dismissed as an empty virtuoso score known mainly from Vladimir Horowitz’s recording.
The second half of the recital proved more draining still. In Malofeev’s subjugating hands, Janácek’s vaporously evocative “In the Mists” became “In the Thick, Disorienting and Blinding Fog” and led, without a pause, into Liszt’s doomed and drummed “Funérailles,” creating an extraordinary sonic vista. This was followed by four elusive Scriabin miniature preludes, Opus 22, and Scriabin’s harmonic flight-of-fancy Opus 28 Fantasie.

As an encore for this unhackneyed recital, Malofeev turned Rachmaninoff’s ultra-hackneyed Prelude in C Minor into something so monumentally thunderous that it nearly overwhelmed all that had come before it. There seems no limits to the depths Malofeev can reach. He is a pianist who lives in an all-consuming piano space, one that he is just beginning to explore. The very good news is that the classical music industry has yet to put the commercial screws on him, allowing him necessary time to follow his bliss. He has made no recordings (although YouTube provides plenty of live performances). Recordings can come later. He needs to first keep testing the bounds.

By Mark Swed, 29.01.025