Music Richard Osborne
RUSSIAN PIANISTS
What is it with Russians and the piano? During a visit to Florence this summer one of the house guests, an eighteenyear-old Russian boy with no real ‘previous’ as a pianist, sat down and played Chopin’s ‘Revolutionary’ Study from memory as a pre-dinner amuse
bouche. Attendant teens and fellow guests were duly awestruck. Back in Russia, I suspect, no one would have batted an eyelid.
A few weeks later I was in Edinburgh’s magnificent Usher Hall (or ‘Oosher’all’ as one of Radio 3’s new-look presenters calls it) attending a recital by Russia’s latest Wunderkind, the 25-year-old Daniil Trifonov. I say ‘latest’ because back to the time of the tsars no country has produced a greater number of spectacularly gifted pianists than the Russian empire in its various incarnations.
The phenomenon dates back to the middle of the 19th century and great pianist-teachers such as Safonov and Pabst (‘a pianist from God’, exclaimed Tchaikovsky), Goldenweiser and Neuhaus. War and revolution drove some talent abroad. One thinks of Horowitz or the young Cherkassky, whose diminutive stature saved his life when a bullet grazed his scalp on the balcony of his parent’s home in Odessa in 1917. But most stayed cocooned within their culture and their art. And, miraculously, most survived. Even Maria Yudina survived, not to
mention the Promethean Sofronitsky and the saintly Bach-besotted Samuil Feinberg.
It was not, however, until after Stalin’s death that the world was allowed to sample some of the choice vintages that had been laid down during the Soviet era. Emil Gilels’s American debut in Philadelphia in October 1955 was a special moment. Here was the pianist whom Rachmaninov had seen as his successor. Yet when the American press hailed Gilels as ‘the greatest’, he told them, ‘Wait until you hear Richter’. It would be a five-year wait.
And so it went on. In 1959 one of Goldenweiser’s star pupils, the 29-yearold Lazar Berman, made an unforgettable recording of Liszt’s twelve Transcendental
Studies for the Soviet Melodiya label. But it was not until 1976 that Berman (and the recording) made it to the West.
When the 23-year-old Trifonov played the Transcendental Studies during a Queen’s Hall recital at the 2014 Edinburgh Festival, one English pianist found herself wondering how anyone could be sufficiently motivated to try to master the torrents of arpeggios, double octaves, chromatic thirds and deathdefying leaps the music presents. Listen to Berman’s recording and the question falls by the wayside, so magical and arresting is the music-making. Great artists have talent and motivation. Daniil Trifonov has now recorded the
Transcendental Studies as part of a two-cd Deutsche Grammophon set which is released this week. Radio 3’s In
Tune played a couple of tracks from the disc as a taster for Trifonov’s Prom with Thielemann and the Dresden Staatskapelle. Though presenter Suzy Klein couldn’t be bothered to name either piece, someone at Radio 3 had chosen well since, in matters of touch and pedalling alone, the juxtaposition of ‘Waldesrauschen’ (‘Forest Murmurs’) and ‘Gnomenreigen’ (‘Dance of the Gnomes’) showed off to perfection the superfine quality of Trifonov’s Liszt playing.
His Prom performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto K467 was, by contrast, a bit of a disaster with its garish cadenzas (Trifonov’s own) and a spectacular mix-up with the orchestra just before the first cadenza. The concerto, whose slow movement graced the film Elvira
Madigan, is a Thielemann favourite, so it may have been wished on Trifonov.
In fact Russians pianists have had difficulties with Mozart. Witness Sviatoslav Richter’s diary entry: ‘Mozart – an age-old problem, I really can’t get to grips with him and I’m afraid I’m not convincing when I play him.’ Gilels was the great exception, of course.
At his Usher Hall recital, Trifonov played Liszt and Rachmaninov (the loose baggy monster that is his First Piano Sonata), framing the evening with Brahms’s transcription for the left hand of Bach’s great D minor Chaconne and a Prelude by Scriabin (also for the left hand) as the strategically placed encore.
For the time being the world is Trifonov’s oyster, though there are those for whom the 44-year-old Russian Nikolai Lugansky is the more interesting musician. Arguably our greatest Rachmaninov pianist, Lugansky has never had a settled recording contract, with the result that such recordings as he has made – a matchless account of the Op 39 Etudes Tableaux, for example – either vanish or are too easily forgotten. Lugansky appears in London and Southampton this month and will be playing in Gateshead, Leeds and Saffron Walden in the New Year. He’s a pianist it would be folly to miss.