Nikita Magaloff

Nikita Magaloff (Russian: Никита Магалов) (21 February [O.S. 8 February] 1912 – 26 December 1992) was a Georgian-Russian pianist.

He was born in Saint Petersburg to a Georgian noble family named Maghalashvili. Magaloff and his family left Russia in 1918 for Finland. His musical interest first stimulated by family friend Serge Prokofiev, he studied with Alexander Siloti before going to Paris, where he studied with Isidor Philipp, chair of the piano department at the Paris Conservatory. He numbered Ravel among his friends there, who, when he graduated in 1929, said 'In Magaloff a great, a truly extraordinary musician is born.'

He was best known for his espousal of the music of Chopin, and was accustomed to perform the complete piano works in series of six recitals. He recorded the complete works — the first time anyone had done so. While these recordings have been criticised for their failure to plumb the depths of Chopin's works, they were innovative for their textual fidelity and unsentimentality. Magaloff, for example, preferred and recorded Chopin's own manuscript versions of the waltzes rather than the familiar versions published posthumously by Julian Fontana.

His interpretations of Mendelssohn are also striking, finding a vein of melancholy that is often missed.

Magaloff's playing carried the hallmarks of Philipp's elegant, refined style, though he himself rejected the sentimental interpretations of Philipp's generation (he was especially critical of Paderewski whom he believed had "falsified Chopin"). He once described himself to the critic and writer Piero Rattalino as 'a vieux style pianist'.

His playing, however, underwent a change in his later years, becoming more passionate, daring and challenging. He remarked, in an interview with Eugenio Scalfari "at the age of seventy, I have come to the conclusion that only the sentiment and fear of death can induce an immoderate passion for life." His last recordings bear eloquent tribute to this "immoderate passion for life".

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