2 pianos, 4 hands: stupendous results
Student-mentor duo Daniil Trifonov and Sergei Babayan shine in Disney Hall recital.
When a special kind of musical telepathy is required, never underestimate the power of the student-mentor relationship. On Sunday night, virtuoso pianists Daniil Trifonov and Sergei Babayan emphatically displayed a mysterious kind of thought transference in their recital at Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Babayan, an Armenian American who studied at the Moscow Conservatory before coming to the U.S. in 1989, was Trifonov’s teacher at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Despite their age difference — Trifonov is 27, Babayan 57 — they proved equal partners, a tribute to Babayan’s teaching and Trifonov’s astonishing musical intelligence and technique.
Together, they gave towering accounts of two-piano works by Schumann, Pärt, Mozart and Rachmaninoff.
In two-piano performances, much depends on rhythm and timing. This partly explains why many duos are friends, siblings (like Katia and Marielle Labèque) or married, like Vitya Vronsky and Victor Babin.
Because Trifonov and Babayan sat at nested pianos and couldn’t see each other’s hands, a lot might have gone wrong. But that’s what makes the best two-piano recitals so exciting.
The duo opened with Robert Schumann’s Andante and Variations in B-flat major (Op. 46) — a hit in the 19th century
Trifonov’s and Babayan’s reading, tentative at first, gathered lyrical warmth as it unfolded, giving the composer’s explosive bursts of harmonic- and cross-rhythmic passages a contrasting, finger-busting velocity.
Next came Arvo Pärt’s otherworldly, subtly droning “Pari intervallo,” a 1976 work originally scored for organ. Here a more pronounced resonance in the piano’s bass from the duo might have conjured a hauntingly textured effect, but each note of their performance was spare and direct.
Trifonov and Babayan’s pianos sounded like a miniorchestra in a richly rewarding account of Mozart’s Sonata in D major (K.448). Of the many felicities during their robust instrumental conversation, an especially memorable moment came when the two pianos sounded in unison in the recapitulation of the opening Allegro’s main theme.
After intermission, they gave magisterial performances of Rachmaninoff’s youthful Suite No. 1, Op. 5 (“Fantaisie-tableaux”), and his more mature Suite No. 2, Op. 17. There were visceral thrills in the First Suite’s “Easter” finale. They also performed the Second Suite’s melodies with sonorous warmth. More impressive, they showed subtle virtuosity in the seamless interplay between the pianos in the rhythmically tricky second movement Waltz. Their energetic Russian-flavored Tarantella finale brought the audience to its feet.
The encore was especially apt: Babin’s brilliant arrangement of RimskyKorsakov’s “Dance of the Tumblers.” Babin’s career (he died in 1972) included serving as president of the Cleveland Institute of Music, where Babayan is artistin-residence. Trifonov and Babayan’s exuberant performance became not only a nod to Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky’s teacher, but also a touching tribute to Babin’s memory.