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At 28, Jan Lisiecki can certainly be called a young musician. But of the pianists making recital debuts at Carnegie Hall recently, he\u2019s something of an elder statesman.<\/p>\n
Last month, Yunchan Lim<\/a>, then still in his teens, confidently pressed through the challenges of Chopin\u2019s \u00e9tudes. And on Tuesday, Alexander Malofeev, 22, was an unruffled guide through the richness of Russian late Romanticism and its afterglow.<\/p>\n Both Lim and Malofeev were appearing at Carnegie for the first time, but Lisiecki has been an occasional presence with orchestras<\/a> there since 2016<\/a>. While the main hall\u2019s scale can be daunting for a solo recitalist, with almost 3,000 people watching, on March 13 he seemed calmly at home from the start.<\/p>\n The second half of Lisiecki\u2019s program was given over to Chopin\u2019s 24 Preludes (Op. 28), while before intermission came an assortment of other short pieces in that genre: a kind of prelude made of preludes. This was a canny mixture of chestnuts and rarities. Lisiecki combined the easily recognizable likes of Bach\u2019s Prelude in C (the opening of \u201cThe Well-Tempered Clavier\u201d) and Rachmaninoff\u2019s in C sharp minor (Op. 3, No. 2) with much less common selections from sets of preludes by Szymanowski, Messiaen and Gorecki.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Lisiecki plays with gentle judiciousness, aristocratic reserve and a touch that tends shadowy without losing a core of clarity. He clearly relishes soft playing, with sensitive effects of distant bells and moonlit drizzles in Messiaen\u2019s \u201cLa Colombe\u201d and \u201cLe Nombre L\u00e9ger,\u201d and a murmured sotto voce in Chopin\u2019s Op. 28, No. 15.<\/p>\n His recordings of Chopin\u2019s \u00e9tudes<\/a> and nocturnes<\/a> offer lovely, generally introverted, smoothed, even sleepy takes on those works. But in an interview<\/a> when the nocturnes were released, Lisiecki said that the album\u2019s slow tempos wouldn\u2019t work in concert.<\/p>\n And in person, he came across as a livelier musician than he does on record, gunning the vivace that Chopin indicates for the third Op. 28 Prelude into something closer to vivacissimo, and gamely rising to the pounding storms of Gorecki and Rachmaninoff.<\/p>\n But it is in poetic wistfulness that Lisiecki shines. The highlight of the program was Chopin\u2019s Prelude in C sharp minor (Op. 45), written a few years after the Op. 28 set and here refined and eloquent, with Lisiecki\u2019s rubato giving the pulse an understated ebb and flow, for a portrait of quiet, lonely searching.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Unlike Lisiecki and Lim, Malofeev played in Carnegie\u2019s smaller Zankel Hall. This was a smart way to introduce him to a New York audience, especially since he doesn\u2019t yet have the backing of a major record label. (Those other pianists are both Decca artists.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n