Pianist Daniil Trifonov’s performance sets Jones Hall ablaze.
Ukraine has been inescapable lately. It was no different at Jones Hall over the weekend.
Luckily, Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” have nothing whatsoever to do with quid pro quo impeachment testimony. The Tchaikovsky is rife with Ukrainian folk melodies, while “Pictures” would lose a great deal of its impact without its blazing finale, “The Great Gate of Kiev.” Or should that be “Kyiv” now?
One thing is for sure: no one who went is likely to forget the astonishing talents of soloist Daniil Trifonov. Calling the 28-year-old Russian pianist a once-in-a-generation talent is probably selling him a little short. Returning to the Houston Symphony for the first time since 2016, this time under the baton of Polish-born guest conductor Krzysztof Urbański, Trifonov left the crowd awestruck. Even now, it’s difficult to expand much on the opinion of one discerning seat-neighbor, which came early in the soloist’s three or four curtain calls. “Jesus,” was all she said.
It’s true, the concerto is one of the greatest crowd pleasers in classical music, and has been for a long time. Its lavish melodies and dynamic contours ensure that the dopamine flows fast and furious for all 30-plus minutes. That said, after witnessing Trifonov’s performance, it’s hard to imagine how it could be done with any more passion or artistry. When he plays the piano, it stays played.
Trifonov is equally capable of pounding the daylights out of the piano or flitting across the keyboard with hummingbird speed. He also produced moments of such delicacy the melodies appeared to evaporate right off the instrument. His tousled hair suited his madscientist posture onstage: hunched over the keyboard, swaying back and forth or bouncing up and down in his seat. Once or twice he lurched upright so abruptly any chiropractors on hand surely winced.
Much of the concerto feels like Tchaikovsky got so excited while writing it he could hardly keep himself, or the soloist, from likewise getting carried away. No matter how frenzied the music got, though, Trifonov’s melodic instincts never failed him.
It started almost immediately, his embellishments turning the concerto’s famous opening theme upside down and inside out; and showed up again in an especially gorgeous part of the second movement, where he pecked out the notes as gently as a child’s music box; and again in the third, where he and the orchestra ran neck and neck while trading off the impish, frenetic tune.
Still, one of the most remarkable parts of Trifonov’s performance was the way he seemed to melt away during his rare resting moments. He was such a dervish at the piano that even the way he sat stock-still as Tchaikovsky’s orchestral fireworks erupted overhead was somehow riveting. Those big blasts were about the only appropriate way for the ensemble to match Trifonov’s prodigious acrobatics.
He encored with “In the Monastery” from Alexander Borodin’s Petite Suite, a piece as yearning and doleful as Tchaikovsky’s concerto was boisterous and jubilant. It took the entire intermission for the audience to recover.
“Pictures at an Exhibition,” as arranged in 1922 by the great Maurice Ravel, is a model of audiovisual suggestion. Based on a series of paintings by Mussorgsky’s late friend, the artist Viktor Hartmann, its rich palette of instrumental timbres makes “Pictures” an ideal introduction to orchestral music on par with Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.”
Knit together by a strolling, inquisitive theme known as “Promenade,” the suite began with the gnarly cello-bass interplay of “Gnome,” punctuated with bass-drum blasts and cryptic bass clarinet. The saxophone-haunted “The Old Castle” introduced the fluttering winds and sunny violins of “Tuileries,” suggesting a children’s game of tag just as the animated flutes and plucked strings of “Chicks in Shells” evoked post-embryonic fowl cavorting around a barnyard.
The later movements were saturated with vintage Russian darkness. “Catacombs” was a funereal series of jarring brass chords that grew softer with the ascension of a torchlike trumpet. In “The Hut on Fowl’s Legs,” based on a painting of the nightmarish Slavic witch Baba Yaga, a violent clash of low strings and brass grew into an orchestrawide bacchanal evoking Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bare Mountain.”
Then “The Great Gate of Kiev” opened like a golden hymn, all cymbal crashes, church bells, and a stately melody no amount of contemporary conspiracy theories could tarnish.