Forgotten Melodies

Alexander Malofeev’s Forgotten Melodies is a 2026 solo piano album and his debut recording for Sony Classical. The program brings together music by four Russian composers: Glinka, Glazunov, Medtner, and Rachmaninoff, all of whom spent their final years away from their homeland. Rather than presenting the album as a simple national or historical survey, Malofeev shapes it around ideas of memory, exile, nostalgia, and an imagined world that may never have fully existed.

The heart of the album is Nikolai Medtner’s Forgotten Melodies cycle, whose inward lyricism and intricate structure suit Malofeev’s combination of clarity, intensity, and poetic restraint. Around it, pieces by Rachmaninoff, Glinka, and Glazunov broaden the emotional range, moving from tenderness and melancholy to virtuoso power and dreamlike stillness. Forgotten Melodies feels like a thoughtful, deeply personal debut: technically commanding, but more concerned with atmosphere, longing, and the fragile persistence of memory than with display for its own sake.