On April 14 I went to the Cemal Reşit Rey Concert Hall to attend a recital by the young Russian pianist Alexander Malofeev. Born in 2001 and currently resident in Berlin, he first came to prominence when he won the piano category of the 8th International Tchaikovsky Competition for Young Musicians, the junior section of the prestigious International Tchaikovsky Competition, in 2014. Two years later, he received the Grand Prix at the 1st ‘Grand Piano Competition’ (International Competition for Young Pianists) in Moscow.

The first item on his programme was Schubert’s 1828 Three Piano Pieces, D 946, which were not published until they were collected and edited (anonymously) by Brahms in 1868. Mr Malofeev’s rendition of the first of these was suitably dramatic – Grant Hiroshima, writing on the ‘LA Phil’ website, speaks of a ‘recurring, restless and foreboding leading section interrupted by two different serene meditations’ – but I thought the melody was rather faint in places. Indeed, Mr Malofeev was rather restrained throughout the Schubert, and I found his interpretation of the second of the three pieces (in which he was hunched over the keyboard) rather unemotional. A little more commitment to the piece’s lyricism, supplemented by a little more rubato, would have been welcome. In the third, which Hiroshima describes as a ‘sunny’ piece that ‘dances along in irregular phrases and folk-dance syncopations’, I was more impressed, thinking the pianist’s calculatedly naif approach entirely appropriate to the mood of the work.

Here is a recording, with the score, of Schubert’s Three Piano Pieces in two consecutive versions – the first by the inimitable Grigory Sokolov and the second by Yulianna Avdeeva, a Moscow-trained pianist (like Alexander Malofeev, she studied at the Gnessin State Musical College) who won the 16th International Chopin Piano Competition. The notes under the YouTube version are extremely detailed, though I have to say I don’t agree with all of them, especially the reference to Schubert’s ‘casual mastery of modulation’ – some of the modulations in the bridge passages of his piano sonatas sound rather awkward to me.

Next on the menu was the 1945 Piano Sonata No 3 in F major, Opus 46, by Dmitry Kabalevsky (1904–87), a highly prolific composer who was one of the founders of the Union of Soviet Composers and a pioneer in the field of music education for children. During 1925–26, while working as a piano teacher in a government school, he was struck by how little material there was for helping children to learn music. Accordingly, he set out to write easy pieces that would allow children to overcome their technical difficulties and develop their musical sensitivity. Having joined the Communist Party in 1940 (smart move!), he was well placed to survive the Zhdanov era, which began in 1948 and resulted in the condemnation of many Soviet composers for ‘bourgeois formalism’. His comparatively traditional stance as a composer and his ‘harmonious’ relations with the regime no doubt served him well in his later career, too: he was awarded the Lenin Prize in 1972, and in 1974 was honoured with the sizzling accolade ‘Hero of Socialist Labour’.

Kabalevsky is best known in the West for his The Comedians suite, and for the lively overture to his opera Colas Breugnon. I have to say that his style is not to my taste (I find it soulless and mechanical, and its atonality – very much in evidence in his piano sonatas – brutal and meaningless rather than trenchant and suggestive), but Alexander Malofeev seemed to enjoy playing his Piano Sonata No 3. There are hints of Prokofiev throughout; the second movement, with its ironic formalism, is slightly reminiscent of the slow movement of this latter’s Piano Sonata No 8, but in my view Kabalevsky’s attempts to create lyricism are severely hampered by his lack of talent as a melodist.

There – I have said my piece. You are at liberty to disagree with my strictures. Here is his Piano Sonata No 3 in F major in a slightly crackly recording by Vladimir Horowitz. If the great Horowitz can’t make it sound good, no-one can.

Thankfully, Mr Malofeev followed the Kabalevsky with two works that were more to my taste – firstly, In the Mists, a suite of four pieces written in 1912 by the Czech composer Leoš Janáček (1854–1928). I am in any case a Janáček fan, having been converted by a Suprafon recording of his wonderfully ecstatic Missa Glagolitica, which I confess I would often play at maximum volume during my student days. (Who wouldn’t? As one would expect from the former choirmaster of the Beseda Brněnská Philharmonic Society in Brno, his choral writing is superb, and the manic organ solo in the finale is a master-stroke.) Mr Malofeev seemed to have become much more engaged with what he was playing during the Kabalevsky, and by the time he got round to the Janáček he was well and truly in his stride. The appearance of a cat on the stage at the beginning of In the Mists may have made a difference on some level, but as it was sitting behind the pianist while it unhurriedly cleaned its face with its paws, he did not notice it. (It certainly did not deign to notice him before stalking off the stage with tail held high.) The notes under the YouTube version of the following recording – which is by the Yorkshireman Michael Crossley (1944-), a pupil of Fanny Waterman who was ‘discovered’ and invited to Paris by Olivier Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod – tell you about the sad circumstances under which this piano cycle was composed.

I very much appreciated the delicacy with which Mr Malofeev played the downward-sweeping arpeggios in the first (marked Andante) of these four pieces, and the atmosphere of veiled intensity he created in the pianissimo parts of the third (marked Andantino). Indeed, the whole performance was shot through and through with drama. I cannot leave the subject of Janáček without listing a performance of his 1926 Missa Glagolitica (‘Glagolitic Mass’), a setting of the mass in Old Church Slavonic in which he sets out to demonstrate – in his own words – ‘how we should talk to God’. This recording does not tell us who is performing, but the orgiastic finale unquestionably starts at 37:21.

Alexander Malofeev’s programme continued to press sweet spots with Scriabin’s Four Preludes, Opus 22, an alternately brooding and naif work dating from 1897 that – especially in the second of the four pieces – displays the composer’s successful handling of chromaticism. In this recording, which is accompanied by the score, the pianist is Maria Lettberg, an acknowledged interpreter of Scriabin who has recorded all his piano works. The notes under the YouTube version will be of interest to the technically-minded, especially to those who know the difference between a French sixth and a German one. (They’re chords, by the way.)

The Four Preludes were followed by Scriabin’s 1900 Fantasy in B minor, Opus 28. Here is a performance of this somewhat intense work by the Brazilian pianist Roberto Szidon (1941–2011), again accompanied by the score. The lyrical second theme begins at 1:52, but it isn’t long before the piece works itself up into a frenzy once again. (One wonders whether quadruple espressos were available in Moscow in those days.)

Playing Scriabin is, above all, a test of musicality. One needs to know how to shape the phrases, when to speed up or slow down, and when to create dramatic pauses. Suffice it to say that Mr Malofeev passed this test with flying colours. Incidentally, I was surprised to find that Glenn Gould, a pianist usually associated with Bach, was not only a gifted interpreter of Scriabin but also an excellent television presenter: in the following recording, he both presents and plays a well-considered selection of the composer’s Preludes.

The next piece in Alexander Malofeev’s recital was Liszt’s 1849 Funérailles, this being No 7 of his Harmonies poétiques et religieuses; it is in fact an elegy for those who had died in the anti-Habsburg Hungarian Revolution of 1848. First, here is the Wikipedia entry for Funérailles.

Now, a recording of it by Arcadi Volodos (1972-), a French pianist of Russian origin.

If Mr Malofeev’s technique impressed the audience in the Liszt, it wowed them good and proper in the last item on his programme – Sergei Rachmaninov’s three-movement Piano Sonata No 2 in B flat minor, Opus 36, written in 1913 and revised in 1931. (In 1940, with the composer’s consent, Vladimir Horowitz created his own version of the piece that combines elements of the original and revised versions.) Rachmaninov started working on this sonata in Rome, where he and his family were living in a house that Tchaikovsky had once occupied; however, when both the Rachmaninov daughters contracted typhoid fever, the whole family moved to Berlin to consult with doctors there. When the girls were well enough to travel, the family moved again – this time to a country estate belonging to the Satins (Rachmaninov’s aristocratic relatives) in the village of Ivanovka, not far from today’s border between Russia and Ukraine. (One wonders whether the house has been damaged in the recent conflict.) The first performance of the Piano Sonata No 2 took place in Kursk in October 1913. Here is a rendition by Nikolai Lugansky.

The notes under the YouTube version of the above rendition, described as a ‘blend’ of the 1913 and 1931 versions of the piece, mention a ringing of bells (this can be heard clearly at 5:38). Might these bells perhaps have been those of the church in the nearby village of Ivanovka? S.A. Satina, a cousin of Rachmaninov’s, tells us the following in her memoirs:

The small village of Ivanovka adjoined our estate. Endless fields stretched around us, merging on the horizon with the sky. In the distance, in the west, the belfry of our parish church, located five miles from Ivanovka, was visible. In the north is someone’s windmill, to the east is nothing but fields, and to the south is our aspen forest. For many miles around Ivanovka, these aspen trees and our garden near the house were the only trees among the fields, and therefore these trees were a refuge for hares, foxes, and even wolves sometimes running from somewhere – especially for birds that built their nests there and filled the air with twittering and singing.

Leaving (with a certain reluctance) this rural idyll and returning to the concert on April 14, it needs to be said that throughout the proceedings up to this point Alexander Malofeev had not taken much notice of the audience beyond acknowledging them with a perfunctory bow or two; however, he certainly seemed to appreciate the rapturous applause he received at the end of the Rachmaninov. It was, of course, well deserved. Indeed, after he had overcome an initial reticence and lack of commitment, he demonstrated both astonishing technical skill and sensitive musicianship of a high order. For a pianist who will be celebrating his 24th birthday this October, he possesses a level of maturity that debars me from describing him as ‘precocious’. It would likewise be inappropriate to say that he ‘shows promise’, for whatever most top-class pianists ‘promise’ to have at the tender age of 23, Mr Malofeev already has. Here he is playing Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2 with the Baltic Sea Philharmonic, conducted by Kristjan Järvi, at the age of – wait for it – 15.