About

Named “The piano poet” by the Vogue Magazine, Malakoff Kowalski was born to Persian parents in Boston and raised in Hamburg, Germany. He currently resides in Berlin where his new album Piano Aphorisms was recorded. “Brilliant. Brave, naked, intense, raw. Ultimately, that’s what real art is about.” Star pianist Igor Levit found highest praise for Malakoff Kowalski’s previous records and continues to do so about Piano Aphorisms, the final album of the solo piano trilogy: “Ferruccio Busoni once said, ‘Music is sonorous air.’ That’s what this music is. Most wonderful sonorous air.”

Kowalski describes his latest piece as follows: “There is a story about Claude Debussy, but I’m not sure if it’s true. After attending a recital of his own music, he was reported to have said, ‘Not bad, almost as if the music hadn’t been scored at all, but had simply been created on the spot.’ Take for example Des pas sur la neige, a piano piece from Debussy’s Préludes—a precisely composed miniature that nonetheless evokes spontaneity as it is being played and heard. I love this particular prélude very much and as you listen to the Piano Aphorisms, I hope you will hear the traces of its influence.