Nikita Mndoyants, born of Armenian descent in 1989, won the 2016 Cleveland Competition. He is a pianist of elegant finish and imagination, his touch rounded and liquid-toned, his feeling for line, texture and form glowingly arched, never a harsh attack or fractured phrase to jar the senses. An expressive lyricist (Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto was his choice for Cleveland, comparably Mozart’s D minor Concerto, including his own cadenzas, at the 2013 Van Cliburn Competition), rumination before risk, pacing rather than rushing fences, is his calling card. Preparation paramount, body language unfussy, he leaves gesture and mannerism to others. His classically focused view of Prokofiev’s Eighth Sonata is leisured and meditative. A good deal of what Richter called its ‘complex inner life, profound and full of contrasts’, its transient sense of numbness, ‘as if abandoning itself to the relentless march of time’, comes across. The D flat major Andante’s ballet-song Romanticism, tricky to convey naturally, emerges clearer and purer than Yuja Wang’s sentimentalisation (‘The Berlin Recital’, DG). The finale ascends powerfully and cohesively.

For Mndoyants, the Fourth Sonata, From Old Notebooks (1917), encapsulates the composer’s ‘typical characteristics’, and is presented ‘allegorical and fairytale-like’, its veining suggestive of Rimsky-Korsakov and Liadov (Prokofiev’s teachers in late-tsarist Petersburg). He conjures an involving, dramatised reading. Mndoyants sits comfortably in a Russian/Soviet tradition not short of fantastical arrangers – from Rachmaninov to Pletnev and Volodos. Compellingly inventive, his realisation of the Scherzo from Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony poses comparison with Feinberg’s landmark 1942 Tchaikovsky transcriptions. An imaginatively crafted, sonorously probing Nocturne of his own (2019) impresses differently, its folkloric minimalism, open-pedal vistas, crowning angst and circling overtones casting a mesmeric spell.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of International Piano. Never miss an issue – subscribe today