Name: Pines of Rome
Start: 2025-10-24T20:00:00
Location: Alte Oper

Alexander Malofeev

Ivan Repušić

Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra

Landscape paintings with a pianist. Framed by shimmering postcard images from Italy and Croatia, the still astonishingly youthful Alexander Malofeev will present one of the most popular and brilliant piano concertos of the Romantic era, whose legendary opening chords are known to everyone. In 2022, Malofeev stepped in for his ailing colleague Yevgeny Kissin with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, performing Rachmaninoff's formidably difficult Piano Concerto No. 3; he was just 20 years old at the time. Now he returns with Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, another work for the consummate virtuoso soloist – though Malofeev avoids every cliché at the piano, always prioritizing refinement over pathos. With meticulous brushstrokes, he paints the landscapes that Croatian conductor Ivan Repušić has grouped around the Tchaikovsky lighthouse. These are the vivid depictions of Roman nature and folklore by Respighi and Tchaikovsky, as well as those "Sunny Fields" to which the Croatian composer Blagoje Bersa dedicated a brilliant, sonorous symphonic poem in 1917.