A rare mixed night for Trifonov at Carnegie Hall
There’s a fascinating mystery around every concert, one that accumulates myriad speculation but no answers. Just what thoughts and moods does a performer have before they step on stage? Do they hear the music they’re about to play in their head? Do they think about a loved one, a movie, a grocery list?
Daniil Trifonov’s recital Thursday night at Carnegie Hall brought this mystery to the fore. This was an uncommon experience from one of the greatest contemporary classical artists. His keyboard playing was as fantastic as always, with a ringing sound, a range of touch and dynamics from hammering to caresses, high velocity and smooth phrasing. The mood, though, and therefore the thinking behind it, was unbalanced, often scattered and even misplaced.
One had a sense that the music on the program was more than a little responsible for this. There was a change to the anticipated works: Trifonov had planned on playing Samuel Barber’s Piano Sonata after intermission, but replaced it with Rachmaninoff’s Variations on a Theme of Corelli (there was no explanation for the charge), which presaged Mikhail Pletnev’s rarrangement of the Concert Suite from Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty. That was the bookend to the concert’s start: Tchaikovsky’s Piano Sonata in C- sharp minor followed by a half dozen Chopin waltzes.
The sonata is an early work, dating from the composer’s time at the St. Petersburg State Conservatory and not published until close to ten years after his death. It is a complete work, though there has been some controversy over whether or not it is finished, as in settled. Trifonov’s playing dug into that, perhaps unintentionally, because it was wildly unsettled.
He threw himself into it, almost literally. He loped onto stage, barely hinted at a bow and started playing at high intensity. The cadence of chords in the opening theme rushed every which way from the confines of rhythm and meter; the mood was immediately full of turmoil, and one’s listening was constantly chasing after him.
This wasn’t problematic playing so much as expression, Trifonov seemed to be constantly changing direction, either struggling to find a path or maniacally switching between them. There were moments of clarity, like the restatement in the first movement and the dance rhythms in the third movement, which Trifonov played with a simple sense of pleasure. But this was a surprisingly muddled interpretation.
The waltzes had the artistry one expected from Trifonov. He played the Op. posth. E Major; the F minor, Op. 70, no. 2; the Op. 64, nos. 3 and 1 (the “minute” Waltz); Op. 34, no. 2 in A minor; and the E minor Op. posth. This set was excellent. Even as the moods were clearer they were also more varied and deeper, the pianist concentrating on a concise range within each but covering more ground in aggregate. The Op. 70 was gorgeously melancholy, the Op. 64s full of charm and the final had piquant drama.
The unsettled feeling returned in the second half. Trifonov is an artist who can bring out the most in music while drawing little to himself, so the mannered statement of the Corelli theme was another unhappy surprise. His touch was light but the phrase was overly deliberate. There is a lot of depth in this piece, not dense but thoughtful. But Trifonov’s playing was dense through the first seven variations, as involuted as the Tchaikovsky sonata, only finding a clear direction in the broken up phrases of Variation VIII and the dark lyricism of Variation IX.
The fundamental problem with the finale was that Pletnev’s arrangement often just does not work. Not all orchestra music can translate to the keyboard, and in this case removing all the colors and instrumental characters from a dramatic narrative leaves a bunch of bravura moments that miss the point. With a virtuoso like Trifonov, the music came off as a series of technically dazzling gestures and flourishes, exciting in the moment but increasingly monotonous. This was a strange end to a strange performance.
Then there were the encores—three of them—which were wonderful. Trifonov is such an extraordinary artist that it is often best to hear him play music that he clearly feels places him in the company of his favorite all-time greats like Art Tatum and Bill Evans. The first was Trifonov channeling Tatum with his own transcription of “I Cover the Waterfront,” now familiar but never well-worn. The second was Bullumba Landestoy’s classic rumba-waltz “Vals de Santo Domingo,” lovingly played. The last, Trifonov’s transcription of the spare, luminous “Secunda” theme from Jeremy Soule’s score from The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim video game. It was the deepest look of the night into the pianist’s thinking.
Pianist Yuliana Avdeeva plays Chopin and Liszt, 7:30 p.m. October 22 in Zankel Hall. carnegiehall.org
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