Review: Electrifying performance by Alexander Malofeev launches VSO season

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The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra began the 2025-26 season — its 107th — at the Orpheum Theatre Friday night, with a brilliant launch for what may well be a challenging moment for our orchestra.

Before the concert began, the audience was made freshly aware that these are fraught times for the arts. VSO musicians dressed in bright blue T-shirts were out in force at the entrances, politely greeting patrons, reminding them of ongoing contract negotiations, and providing a timely reminder of all the orchestra means for local audiences.

Inside the theatre, and once the last rousing notes of O Canada faded away, music director Otto Tausk conducted American composer Missy Mazzoli’s Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres), a work the maestro deemed a good companion for Richard Strauss’s 1896 Also sprach Zarathustra, which was to end the evening. Mazzoli is no Strauss, but her curtain raiser proved an amiable meander through the orchestra. Nothing especially memorable or moving, but nicely chosen colours in well-crafted music.

Strauss’s 1896 tone poem, suggested by the then-fashionable writings of Nietzsche, is a mishmash of memorable bombast — that opening! — and the descriptive scene painting so characteristic of the Bavarian composer’s tone poems. Tausk concluded last season with a real Strauss rarity, An Alpine Symphony, created two decades after Zarathustra but very much of the same ilk. Nice as it is to see an Orpheum stage filled with all those players, changed for the second half of the program back into their pre-concert blue T-shirts, I can’t help wondering if this was the best programming choice for a band in back-to-school mode. It was all good fun, but there were also some rough edges.

The same could be said of the performance of Tchaikovsky’s B flat major piano concerto. Except that given young Alexander Malofeev as the soloist, no one cared in the slightest. We hear this concerto rendered far too frequently by pianists who provide little more than serviceable readings of the extravagant music, but Malofeev’s all-or-nothing style was electrifying. His sound is immense and powerful, his tone dark and rich or lithe and sparkling as required. His dynamic range alone is extraordinary. And in solo passages, his sense of rhythmic freedom allows his audience to cherish Tchaikovsky’s extraordinary lyric moments. COVID, and then international music politics, forced us to wait a bit to enjoy Malofeev live; he’s been well worth the delays, as a wildly enthusiastic house demonstrated.

There was, of course, an encore — Mikhail Pletnev’s piano transcription of the great Pas de deux from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, as thrilling and as emotional as anything the Russian master conceived for orchestra, but rendered here by ten fingers on two hands. What a ride! An encore worth the price of admission all on its own.

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