Maxim Trefan (born 21 October 1960 in Moscow) is a Russian rock musician and keyboardist of the group Vezhlivy Otkaz. He began studying piano with Anna Artobolevskaya, graduated from the Gnessin music school, and continued his education as a classical pianist with Leonid Brumberg and, at the Gnessin Institute, with Boris Berlin and Oleg Boshnyakovich.
In the mid-1980s he performed improvisations on piano and synthesizers. In 1987 he joined Nikolai Kopernik, described as one of the first new-wave groups in Russia. He also played in the styles of world music and thrash metal with the bands Alyans and Korroziya Metalla; in the latter he used the pseudonym “Python” and recorded keyboard parts for their albums of 1990–1996.
In 2019 Trefan graduated from the Gnessin Russian Academy of Music in composition, studying with Alexey Larin. As a composer, he wrote music for the films Good Services by Luis Orihuela and Angelus and Wedding of Silence by Wilson Burbano. His works also include the cycle Rivers for domra, as well as compositions for piano, cello, viola, double bass, bassoon, string trio, symphony orchestra, and romances on poems by members of the Yuzhinsky circle, including Mamleev, Golovin, Provotorov, Grazhdankin, Dzhemal, and Kovenatsky.
He performed in a duo with German Dyzhechko, the leader of Matrosskaya Tishina, and repeatedly in a duo with Sergey Letov. He also recorded with the groups Tribunal, Splin, Obermaneken, and Devyat.
As a composer, Trefan was a regular participant in the Alternativa festival in the 1990s, where in 1993 his vocal cycle on poems by Evola was premiered. He also took part in Vladimir Martynov’s festivals from 2011 to 2019. In 2024 he won second place at the international E. Artemyev composer competition Sibiriada.
Beyond performance and composition, he gave talks on postmodernism, Tchaikovsky, Scriabin, and Sviridov at the seminars “Analogy and Identity” of Geidar Dzhemal, at the Roman Courtyard, and at conferences including “Orient & Occident: challenge and response” in Yekaterinburg (Ural Federal University, 2013), “The Creative Legacy of Georgy Gachev” in Moscow (IMLI, 2014), and “Creativity in Life and Culture: the Phenomenon of Georgy Gachev” in Moscow (IMLI, 2019).