hr-Sinfonieorchester

Landscape painting with pianist. Framed by dazzling postcard motifs from Italy and Croatia, the still astonishingly young Alexander Malofeev will present one of the most popular and brilliant piano concertos of the Romantic period, whose legendary first chords are known to everyone. In 2022, Malofeev stood in for his colleague Evgeny Kissin, who was ill, with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra in Rachmaninov's horrendously difficult Third Piano Concerto, when he was just 20 years old. Now he returns with Peter Tchaikovsky's Concerto in B flat minor, another work for the solid virtuoso in the soloist - although Malofeev avoids any clichés at the piano and always favours refinement over pathos. The landscapes that the Croatian conductor Ivan Repušić groups around the Tchaikovsky lighthouse are portrayed with brushstrokes of subtlety. These are the vivid Roman depictions of nature and folklore by Respighi and Tchaikovsky, as well as the ‘Sunny Fields’, to which the Croatian Blagoje Bersa dedicated a brilliant, sonorous symphonic poem in 1917. (hr-Sinfonieorchester)