Saturday August 16

A Recital by Alexander Malofeev piano

Franz Peter Schubert

Three Piano Pieces, D. 946

By far the larger part of Schubert’s work remained unpublished at the time of his tragically early death. Many of those works remained unknown for decades, but were preserved in a closet in the home of Schubert’s brother, Ferdinand. Others had been offered in vain to various publishers. In their view, Schubert’s death presumably meant that there would be little interest in his work in coming years. The Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Society of the Friends of Music) proposed to perform his Symphony No. 6, in C major, in their concert of December 14, 1828, but his death in November limited the impact of what might have been an increased public awareness of a great composer after Beethoven’s recent death. (The C-major symphony chosen for this honor was widely believed to be his most recent symphonic composition, even though it was a decade old. The Unfinished Symphony and the Great C-major symphony were only performed in 1867 and 1839, respectively.)

The Three Piano Pieces (Drei Klavierstücke) were only found, published, and performed long after Schubert’s demise. Johannes Brahms (one of the great Schubert admirers) anonymously prepared the edition for its 1868 publication. It was he who suggested the title for these three otherwise unnamed compositions, though the German term “Klavierstücke” suggests briefer works—and ones much simpler for the pianist—than these. When Otto Erich Deutsch prepared his Schubert thematic catalog, he renamed them Three Impromptus, partly because he was convinced that Schubert planned to add a fourth movement, making the set similar to the two earlier substantial works, each of which was called Four Impromptus (D. 899 and D. 935). This would have been a possible plan, but there is no surviving evidence of it.

These three pieces, composed in April and May of 1828, fall squarely among the handful of masterpieces that Schubert completed in his last months—the Quintet in C, the A-major Rondo for piano duet, and the B-flat Piano Sonata. All three of the D. 946 pieces exhibit the kind of lyrical inwardness so characteristic of Schubert, which sets him apart to some degree from Beethoven.

The first, in E-flat minor, suggests a passionate mood of deep torment, and the middle section of its A-B-A form is deeply contemplative. (There was originally a third section that Schubert thought better of and crossed out in the manuscript.)

The second piece is based on a charming tune in E-flat major drawn from his opera Fierrabras. It contrasts with two other sections in an A-B-A-C-A pattern; the first contrasting section is in a dark C minor, suggesting some of Schubert’s most despairing songs, while the second is in a luminous A-flat major.

The third is vigorous, with a lively main theme of driving C-major syncopations. Eva Badura-Skoda hears a Slavic element in the frequent employment of five-bar phrases. The central section begins with a surprising modulation to D flat and makes apparent references to Schubert’s song Die Sterne (The Stars), composed three months before.

— © Steven Ledbetter

Dmitry Kabalevsky

Piano Sonata No. 3 in F Major, op. 26

When Dmitry Kabalevsky came to the United States in 1959 with an official delegation of Soviet composers, Musical America described him as “the friendliest and most extrovert of the six, qualities also characteristic of his music.” By this time, Kabalevsky had become one of the most successful and truly popular composers in Soviet musical history, and a major power player in the Byzantine political apparatus of Soviet culture. Active on the Moscow musical scene since the 1920s, the ambitious Kabalevsky used his diplomatic skills and personal charm to survive and even thrive through the years of Stalinism and afterwards, skillfully negotiating the perilous shifts in official cultural policy.

Outside of the USSR, however, Kabalevsky’s appealing, accessible, and mostly cheerful music remained much less known than the works of his colleagues Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich, who shunned the public role Kabalevsky eagerly sought. Kabalevsky eventually developed a close personal and creative relationship with Prokofiev, whom he took as a musical model. Like Prokofiev, Kabalevsky had a special talent for writing music for children, and became widely known in the USSR as a pioneering advocate of musical education.

Kabalevsky wrote prolifically in many genres, producing concertos for piano, violin, and cello, as well as operas, four symphonies, string quartets, oratorios, songs, film scores, and more than 100 pieces for piano solo. His best-known work, the carnivalesque overture to his opera Colas Breugnon (1937), has been frequently performed and recorded around the world. Based on a novel by French writer Romain Rolland, the opera relates the adventures of a seventeenth-century Burgundian artisan, a Robin Hood figure whose anti-aristocratic sentiments aligned—not coincidentally—with Soviet artistic ideology.

Like Prokofiev and Shostakovich, Kabalevsky was an accomplished pianist, trained under Alexander Goldenweiser at Moscow Conservatory. Some of his earliest compositions were for piano, and he went on to produce an impressive body of work for the instrument, including three concertos, three piano sonatas, a set of twenty-four preludes, and many other collections and incidental pieces. Of his three piano sonatas, the Third is the most often played, and has been recorded by many pianists, notably Vladimir Horowitz, who gave the American premiere and often included the piece in his recital programs.

Kabalevsky wrote the Third Sonata just after the end of World War II, and it reflects images of that devastating conflict that took the lives of millions of Soviet citizens and left large parts of the country in ruins. “The Sonata lacks a concrete program, yet two themes, two major images: youth and war, prevail here,” Kabalevsky said. “The collision of those themes and the final triumph of youth sums up the plot of the work!” In three movements, fast-slow-fast, the sonata opens with a simple sunny theme in F major, followed quickly by a lyrical song-like subject. But in the development section, both themes are transformed and distorted, rising in intensity and rhythmic drive, punctuated with strategically placed dissonant exclamations that project a mood of anxiety and tension that is only partially resolved in the recapitulation.

In the second movement, Andante cantabile, the influence of Prokofiev seems very evident, especially the second movement of Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata, completed just a few years earlier. Both of these movements are in very slow triple time, pensive and thickly harmonized. As in the first movement, Kabalevsky disrupts the serenity of the B-flat major opening with a contrasting central section that moves uneasily through various harmonic shifts before gradually subsiding to a calmer conclusion.

The vigorous and energetic concluding Allegro giocoso starts with a catchy marching tune that has been compared to Shostakovich’s “toy-shop” themes. But this, too, undergoes radical transformation in a riot of sixteenth-note runs and virtuosic display that seems to express feelings of long-repressed jubilation and celebration. The Sonata ends with a confident if manic return to F major, its strong cadence promising certainty and security after the storms of war.

— © Harlow Robinson

Alexander Malofeev rose to international prominence in 2014 when, at just thirteen, he won the International Tchaikovsky Competition for Young Musicians. Since then, Malofeev has established himself as one of the leading pianists of his generation, performing with top orchestras and conductors around the world. Highlights of the 2025–26 season include concerto engagements with the Vancouver, Oregon, Buffalo, Seattle, and Frankfurt Radio symphonies, Netherlands Philharmonic, Vienna Symphony, and Belgian National Orchestra. In March he embarks on a recital tour across the U.S., with performances in Orlando, Houston, Santa Monica, Fresno, Sarasota, Sanibel, and Atlanta with a fin-de-siècle recital featuring Sibelius, Grieg, Prokofiev, Skryabin, and Lourié, along with Rautavaara’s The Fire Sermon. Recent highlights include performances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, a six-city solo tour in China, recitals in Korea with cellist Jaemin Han, festival appearances in Salzburg and Edinburgh, and a special appearance in Vatican City for the inauguration of Pope Leo XIV. Born in Moscow in 2001, Malofeev now resides in Berlin. He is an exclusive Sony Classical recording artist, and his debut album will be released in fall 2025.