Dazzling virtuoso lives up to the hype
Although still only 28 years old, Daniil Trifonov is fully deserving of being this season’s subject of the London Symphony Orchestra’s Artist Portrait series. It is nearly a decade since he burst on to the scene by storming the Tchaikovsky, Rubinstein and Chopin piano competitions, and in the years since he has cemented his place in the top flight of international pianists and proved himself one of the most distinctive. If
that position has occasionally shown him liable to display the mannerisms of a maverick, he nearly always convinces you that’s how the music should go – the mark not just of authentic talent but pianistic genius.
So it proved again here in his generously filled recital. Making a disarming start with Beethoven’s
Andante Favori, he supplied pianistic balm without ever straying towards the salon connotations of this popular piece, also finding seriousness worthy of a movement that had originally been part of the composer’s Waldstein sonata. Pressing straight on into Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 18 in E flat, he immediately created a sense of magical freshness, caressing the keyboard softly in the opening movement, yet bringing rapid-fire excitement to the scherzo. Only the minuet and trio suffered from Trifonov’s tendency to drag things out.
Yet, the Russian pianist almost always justified any wayward tempos. Only a select few pianists can get away with such a level of interpretative intervention, but in Schumann’s Bunte
Blätter, even the movements in which Trifonov was most subjective sounded convincing. He certainly created magic, especially in the celestial middle section of the big Marsch and with the strange wonderment he brought to
Abendmusik. As further evidence of his intelligent programming, he balanced that Beethoven movement culled from a sonata with Schumann’s Presto
Passionato, and handled its wild chase with easy virtuosity.
Trifonov’s dreaminess and extreme virtuosity were both to the fore after the interval in Prokofiev’s Eighth Sonata. The last of the Soviet composer’s “war sonatas”, it found Trifonov taking everything in his stride with room to produce wide gradations of volume of colour. He never made an ugly sound even amid the motor rhythms and fusillades of the finale, and in the central movement he conjured up the innocence of a world lost for ever.