Daniil Trifonov
In music old and new, Daniil Trifonov is always seeking a personal connection with the keys and an organic relationship with the piano, he tells
The Russian superstar on reinventing Bach, listening to Horowitz and why he won’t play with a rigid back
Iwill go out on a limb and say that only one pianist – ever – has given equally accomplished performances of Rachmaninov, late Bach and Stockhausen. The pianist I’m talking about is Daniil Trifonov, and two summers ago, in July 2019, he was sitting opposite me in a hotel lobby in Verbier. Back then, Trifonov was in the foothills of learning Bach’s culminating fugal masterpiece, The Art of Fugue. His intention was to begin performing it the following summer: ‘I like to have a year of little by little getting to know a piece. I like to work on it, then leave it, and maybe come back to it in a month.’ But we all know what happened next.
At the time, all he would say was that his approach to both the cycle and the associated recital tour was at an embryonic stage. The intervening months and years have gestated a remarkable album, ‘The Art of Life’, which sets the cycle in the context of music by Bach’s prodigally gifted – and of course rigorously trained – family, notably his sons Carl Philipp Emanuel (most original), Wilhelm Friedemann (his father’s favourite) and Johann Christian (most successful, as ‘the
London Bach’). There’s generous room too, though, made for Johann Sebastian’s second wife, Anna Magdalena, in the form of excerpts from her two Notebooks which form something of a family diary of music-making chez Bach in the early years of the Capellmeister’s tenure in Leipzig.
It’s quite something to hear Trifonov whistle through a JC Bach Presto with his trademark fluidity – a meeting point of technique and imagination for which the only historical parallel that springs to mind is Horowitz’s Scarlatti – before he lavishes those prodigious gifts on a piece as simple as the familiar old Petzold Minuet last seen in these pages in Pianist 55. It’s like a Michelin-starred chef taking the time out to prepare you scrambled eggs on toast.
When it comes to The Art of Fugue itself and the notoriously unfinished final piece in the cycle, Trifonov’s intention back in 2019 was to leave it hanging: ‘I like how Glenn Gould ends. He ends abruptly and I think that’s a strong effect.’ Second thoughts evidently arose while the world turned still, and gave Trifonov the time to reactivate his compositional impulses, holed up at home in Connecticut with his wife Judith.
Instead, the pianist’s own completion picks up seamlessly from ‘where the Master laid down his pen’ in the sentimental terminology of CPE’s obituary for his father, and proceeds to weave together the composer’s B-A-C-H signature with the fugue’s previously developed themes, as well as the main theme of the entire cycle, before thinning out into a peaceful dissolve.
The unbroken thread of history
The very brilliance and individuality of Trifonov’s solution may well divide opinion, and not for the first time. He spoke to me a couple of days after stunning a packed audience in Verbier with his ‘Decades’ programme, first presented in New York in 2018 and last heard in Berlin in May 2021. A single piece represents each decade of the last century, from the Piano Sonata by Berg (1909) through to Traced Overheard by Adès (1996), taking in idioms as diverse as Klavierstück IX by Stockhausen (1955) and China Gates by Adams (1977) along the way. The idea is so obvious, you wonder why it hasn’t been done before. Then you reflect on the flexibility of technique and breadth of artistic sympathies required.
The conservative Verbier audience lapped it all up, until Trifonov acknowledged the rapturous reception, placed his watch on the music stand and sat at the piano. Uneasy murmurings gave way to shuffling and then some thin applause, cutting short his spontaneous encore of Cage’s 4’33” (1952). It was a showman’s gesture, but then Liszt and Charles Rosen in their own times found no contradiction between intellectual brilliance and a virtuoso’s flourish. The ‘Decades’ project merits a recording no less than Trifonov’s award-winning Rachmaninov cycle, to illustrate the continuities as well as the contrasts in modern and modernist piano writing, and to bring pieces like Ligeti’s Musica Ricercata to a wider audience beyond the rarified ‘new music’ realm.
Trifonov places phenomenal demands of concentration and stamina on himself. The ‘Decades’ recital is presented in two 70-minute halves. During the past summer he has played Bach’s Chaconne (in the left-hand arrangement by Brahms) and The Art of Fugue in one unbroken 95-minute span. Such seriousness of purpose is surely a trademark of his Russian schooling, but he doesn’t follow the old practice of first studying the score away from the piano. ‘I’ve tried doing this before now,’ he says, ‘but it has resulted in a calculated approach that didn’t feel organic.’
What he does avoid is other people’s recordings, at least early on in the learning process – ‘because they give all kinds of ideas which can be good once you know the piece. I approach a piece by starting to play it, to see what I feel about it and what I want to hear. Later on I will listen to recordings, and I still try to play to my teacher Sergei Babayan, then you get all these insights. But in the beginning you need a personal connection between you and the music. In that sense, playing is an indispensable part of it.’
Training but no trainers
Long known first and foremost as a teacher, Babayan now has quite a following as a mercurial performer in his own right – not least thanks to his evolving relationship with Trifonov, as teacher, then mentor and often duet partner. The night after the ‘Decades’ recital, they played double concertos by Bach and Mozart, and their wordless rapport is plain to hear in the C major Rondo Op 73 on Trifonov’s album of ‘Chopin Evocations’. In concert, around the slow movement of the Bach, the two pianists built a pavilion of filigree improvisation, compensating for the long notes of the original solo violin parts that can’t be sustained on the piano. ‘That was spontaneous. We didn’t agree it beforehand. I heard what he does, and I would respond one way or another.’
Trifonov moved to the US in 2009 to study with Babayan at the suggestion of his previous teacher, Tatiana Zelikman, but the two had barely met before their first lesson at the Cleveland Institute of Music – ‘I trusted Tatiana’. ‘I played the Third Sonata of Chopin,’ he continues. ‘We worked on the first movement. I came in sneakers, and the first thing he made clear was that at the next lesson I would be appearing in more formal clothes!’
What is Babayan’s secret? ‘He is always very detailed and to the point in his comments. He’s extremely efficient in the amount he gets done in a certain time. He always has clear ideas. He sees straight to the heart of a problem – it could be a locked shoulder, or not enough attention to the pedal, or the wrong phrasing.’
Trifonov goes on to discuss Babayan’s connection to the ‘natural forces’ in a given piece of music, and this concept is one he has developed himself. ‘It’s important to build a connection with the keys. I like to dig in to the keyboard with my fingers. So it might look like an octopus trying to devour something,’ – and at this point Trifonov draws and grasps invisible shapes in the air with his unnervingly long, pale and, yes, tentacular fingers – ‘or trying to pull something towards me. Some of this is intuitive, some of it is practice. And this makes it easier to control the sound.’
The opening, theatrical gesture of Klavierstück IX is a diminuendo over a pounding chord, repeated first 142 and then 87 times. Trifonov appears almost motionless while executing such passages, and I wonder at his finger strength, but he gently corrects me. ‘It’s in the wrist. The wrist needs to be flexible, because if it’s tense it’s not healthy for the hands, which get tired quickly. But also the wrist determines the natural kinetic energy of the hand. It’s important always to be in motion, never static. Even if my back is arched – because for some music I’ll be much closer to the keyboard – I still try to move my spinal cord so it doesn’t lock in one position.’
Head and heart
He points to analogies in nature such as the movements of a bear or a dolphin as the model for a kind of second nature when addressing the piano. ‘We often allow ourselves to do very inorganic things. OK, so the piano isn’t the most organic instrument either! Even more, then, we should counteract it with as much fluidity and natural motion as possible. When I was studying in Cleveland I did some technical studies on how the different touches at the piano produce different wave forms. The tenser the hand was, the sharper the spike on the form and the faster the decay of the note. What’s better is minimising the entrance attack on the key and then also softening the exit – like catching the key on the way rather than forcing it to go somewhere. Then the sound appears more gradual and lasts longer.’
The idea of treating the piano as a living organism reminds me of great Russian pianists from the past and most of all The Well-Tempered Clavier recorded by Samuil Feinberg. Trifonov nods: ‘Horowitz did this too. In Moscow we had a two-year course for the piano students, blind listening to a number of pianists in a given piece. We’d have to react, and try to guess who played which version. In a lot of cases I found Horowitz’s version to be my favourite.’
Reductive talk of a balance between head and heart in performance, whatever the repertoire, quickly seems superficial in the face of Trifonov’s analysis. ‘A lot of it is to do with the sending of emotional signals to the tips of the fingers to make the keyboard speak. It’s not about a mechanical action, but an organic one. Finding the emotions in the music and amplifying them and making sure they’re delivered to the audience. The rest is up to spontaneity.’
Such responsiveness to the moment comes down to deep listening as much as hours of practice. ‘Sometimes it can be dangerous because I am listening too closely. In one concert I was playing the Paganini Rhapsody, and I was so intent on the music, I was listening to the opening in the orchestra and waiting for the piano entry – and just for a moment it didn’t come to me that I was the one who was actually supposed to play it!’
‘The Art of Life’ is available on Deutsche Grammophon (CD, LP and streaming) from 8 October. Forthcoming concerts include a US recital tour in November and the premiere in San Francisco of the Piano Concerto by Mason Bates. See daniiltrifonov.com for details.