Russian virtuoso rises to challenge
Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto poses difficulties for performers on several levels. The piece is a challenge just from a technical perspective — there are, you know, a whole lot of notes to get right — but what’s even harder is to make the piece sound like more than just a bristling array of fearsome scales and chords.
Daniil Trifonov, the young Russian virtuoso who played the piece on Thursday, June 21, with Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, had no trouble at all with the concerto’s technical demands. He never does — Trifonov gets his fingers around a keyboard like a champ, with accuracy and bravura.
What was interesting about the performance, rather, was the way he worked to impart eloquence and grace to Rachmaninoff’s splashiest passages. That’s the part of the equation that can sometimes be hit- or-
miss with Trifonov, whose keyboard mastery devolves on occasion into slam- bang bluntness.
That tendency reared its head at times in Davies Symphony Hall, particularly in the punishing first movement. The sweet, luminous minor- key tune that begins the concerto in counterintuitive fashion — a melody so bone- simple you can’t believe Rachmaninoff has any virtuoso display in store — sounded utterly entrancing, with a languorous backward pull to the rhythm.
Once past that point, though, Trifonov took off at a thunderous gallop, like a racehorse suddenly loosed from restraints. Thomas actually turned around from the podium, looking slightly alarmed, and began waving his baton in Trifonov’s direction as if to say, “Remember the tempo we agreed on just a few moments ago?”
Yet even at his most undisciplined, Trifonov had some enlightening things to say about this music — bringing out the melodic undercurrents that can sometimes be swamped by the movement’s profuse passagework, and shining a revelatory spotlight on the expressive potential of even the most extroverted writing.
That expressivity came to the fore even more winningly in the central slow movement, where Trifonov and the orchestra collaborated on a delicate back- and- forth of harmonic sidesteps and melodic charm. And in the finale, Trifonov found the purest combination yet of dexterity and transparency — he never shied away from the music’s thorny excess, but he delivered it all with a lightfingered elegance that helped tie the entire concerto together.
For the concert’s first half, Thomas brought together the last two symphonies of Sibelius — a pair of elusive oddballs that the composer wrote in tandem. To hear them back- to- back like this was to be struck anew by the way the pieces defy symphonic norms.
The Sixth Symphony, which is ultimately the more difficult one for both listeners and interpreters, at last has a somewhat traditional four- movement formal plan, even if none of the movements operates in the way you might expect. The Seventh, by contrast, is compact and almost breathless in its single unbroken rush through a succession of musical ideas.
Thomas and the orchestra sounded almost as perplexed by the Sixth as the audience did, moving through the piece with a buoyancy that was alternately appealing and a little glib. The Seventh brought out a more concentrated and effective approach, in which the orchestra felt like a sure- footed guide through the unpredictable terrain of Sibelius’ musical thought.