Trifonov’s resplendent Chopin
It wasn’t all that long ago that the young Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov introduced himself to Bay Area audiences with a series of punishingly brusque performances of showpieces by Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff — appearances that were sharply at odds with the reports from elsewhere of his virtuosity and interpretive depth.
Then on Monday night, that other guy — poetic, imaginative, musically inventive in ways both large and a small — put in an overdue and welcome appearance in Davies Symphony Hall. Trifonov’s expansive solo recital, presented as part of the San Francisco Symphony’s Great Performers Series, was a marvel of introspective elegance, at once thoughtful and richly sensual.
Something has changed, and it’s not just the silky beard Trifonov now sports. I’m inclined to credit Chopin.
Chopin was the presiding spirit in a program that was planned with all the dramatic ingenuity of a drawing-room stage play. In repertoire that is also represented on his inviting new two-disc release from Deutsche Grammophon, Trifonov began not with Chopin himself, but with his music as reflected in the imagination of others.
So the entire first half (with one winning exception) was devoted to variations on Chopinian themes by composers of the 19th and 20th centuries. To begin with there was Frederic Mompou, the foppish Catalan composer whose ingratiating music is still too rarely heard in the concert hall.
Certainly Trifonov’s resplendent account of his Variations on a Theme of Chopin (1957) made a listener eager to encounter this piece and others like it more often. The theme in question is the AMajor Prelude from Chopin’s Op. 28 (although another familiar melody makes an endearing late cameo), and Mompou’s treatment of the material makes its way through an astounding crescendo of effects — from the first variation, in which he does nothing more than add a single piquant note to one of Chopin’s harmonies, through a series of indolent, offhanded passages all the way to a burst of extravagant keyboard display.
Trifonov took not only the measure of Mompou’s virtuoso writing — there is evidently no technical challenge too fierce for him — but more importantly, he located the expressive undercurrent running through the entire set. In his performance, you could hear Mompou gradually dropping his affectation of jaded hedonism in favor of something more committed, more impassioned.
Serving as a bookend just before intermission were Rachmaninoff ’s Variations on a Theme of Chopin, Op. 22 — this time drawing from another Prelude from Chopin’s Op. 28, the one in C minor. Here Trifonov unleashed a more dynamic, thunderously extroverted style, in a reading that emphasized the Russian reaction to Chopin’s musical legacy.
In between, Trifonov assembled a collection of short homages, beautifully rendered responses to Chopin’s general style rather than to specific works. They included the inimitable Chopin portrait in Schumann’s “Carnaval,” Chopinesque character pieces by Grieg and Tchaikovsky, and Barber’s homage to the Irish composer John Field, who invented the piano nocturne that Chopin later expanded.
By the time the recital’s second half began, we were ready to hear some actual Chopin. But Trifonov had one more trick up his sleeve — Chopin’s great set of variations on Mozart’s “Là ci darem la mano,” which he rendered in terms at once vivid and speculative.
The result was that by the time the audience heard Chopin’s own original voice, in the form of his Second Piano Sonata, we were both ravenously hungry and artistically disoriented. And Trifonov’s performance — powerful, mannered, full of eloquent surprises — sated our hunger without alleviating the sense of disorientation.
The first movement emerged in a wave of textural effects, almost as if Chopin’s harmonic choices were secondary. The contrasts among the sections of the scherzo were drawn with outlandish zeal, and the famous funeral march went by slowly and with poker-faced stoicism — less mournful than shellshocked.
Each of these decisions, and many smaller ones, landed with a shock that soon relaxed into acceptance and even wonderment, as Trifonov made his case again and again with rhetorical force and rich sonorities. The slow movement from Chopin’s Cello Sonata, arranged for piano by Alfred Cortot, made a lovely, luminous encore.
Chopin was the presiding spirit in a program that was planned with all the dramatic ingenuity of a drawing-room stage play.