Alexander Malofeev
REVIEW: At Carnegie Hall, the New Pianists Are Young and Younger
Jan Lisiecki, 28, is the elder statesman alongside Alexander Malofeev and Yunchan Lim in a trio of recent recital debuts at the hall.
By Zachary Woolfe
At 28, Jan Lisiecki can certainly be called a young musician. But of the pianists making recital debuts at Carnegie Hall recently, he’s something of an elder statesman.
Last month, Yunchan Lim, then still in his teens, confidently pressed through the challenges of Chopin’s études. And on Tuesday, Alexander Malofeev, 22, was an unruffled guide through the richness of Russian late Romanticism and its afterglow.
Both Lim and Malofeev were appearing at Carnegie for the first time, but Lisiecki has been an occasional presence with orchestras there since 2016. While the main hall’s scale can be daunting for a solo recitalist, with almost 3,000 people watching, on March 13 he seemed calmly at home from the start.
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Like Lisiecki, he offered a mix of the familiar and not. Alongside Rachmaninoff favorites in the second half of his concert, he included a work that had never been played at Carnegie: Scriabin’s Two Impromptus (Op. 12).
The opening of a cycle called “Forgotten Melodies,” Medtner’s “Sonata-Reminiscenza” in A minor was a treat, a fantasia on nostalgia in which a memory of childlike songfulness is passed through 14 minutes of varied colors and textures. In other hands, the piece might have expanded to more grandeur, but Malofeev kept it beautifully intimate.
The textures were more roiled than rich in the first piece on the program, Samuil Feinberg’s transcription of Bach’s Organ Concerto in A minor (BWV 593). But Malofeev’s Scriabin — those impromptus, as well as the Prelude and Nocturne for the Left Hand (Op. 9) — was relaxed and suave.
He excels in Rachmaninoff, with considerable power yet a light, even witty touch. The Sonata No. 2 in B flat minor (in its revised, condensed version) was flexible but didn’t lose a sense of structure and intention. The faintest pinprick of a high note near the end of the first movement; the subtle gracefulness of a late melody in the second; the balance of sternness and glitter in the finale — all was impressively assured.
He and Lisiecki both played Rachmaninoff’s Op. 3, No. 2 prelude, but were intriguingly distinct in it. Lisiecki made the piece gravely granitic, while Malofeev rendered it more offhand and dreamlike.
In a good way, though, these two pianists are more alike than different, both with a style that’s fundamentally calm and modest, never showy even at their most virtuosic.