ALEXANDER MALOFEEV

With the addition of a fourth piece, Schubert’s three Klavierstücke could have formed a third final cycle of impromptus. This final piece never came, and with good reason: Schubert composed the first three only six months before his death. Fantastic visions reminiscent of the Winterreise, wild syncopations akin to the Ländler that meant so much to the composer; this all-too-rare collection reproduces the miracle of the first Impromptus books in an even more anguished and ghostly vein.  

After his death, Kabalevsky’s name gradually disappeared from the programmes. Yet during his lifetime, the composer was considered the equal of Prokofiev and Shostakovich. The playful spirit of the first movement, the waltz-like mood of the second, and the fanfare of the Finale are the main features of a work full of character that is just waiting to be performed again.  

Janáček’s In the Mists and Liszt’s Funérailles both bear the mark of death: Janáček had just lost his daughter Olga, while Liszt wrote this piece from the Harmonies poétiques et religieuses as a tribute to the victims of the crushing of the Hungarian revolution in 1848. Both works are in four sections, and while Janáček develops an atmosphere of misty torpor in each of them, Liszt gives his work a more dramatic framework, worthy of a symphonic poem.  

The Preludes Op. 22 and the Fantasy Op. 28 are by the late nineteenth-century Scriabin. They strike an ideal balance between a pure display of pianistic virtuosity and an exploration of the harmonic kaleidoscope that would later give rise to his atonal explorations. As chance would have it, Scriabin composed these pieces in his twenties, and there is every reason to believe that the 24-year-old Alexander Malofeev is one of the most capable of understanding the cryptic spirit of the composer of the Poem of Fire.