The centrepiece of Daniil Trifonov’s residency with the London Symphony Orchestra this month was a solo recital. It was a well-packed, generous performance, which provided further confirmation that the 28-year-old Russian is one of the finest pianists today. Despite his celebrity, though, Trifonov is still revealing new aspects of his artistry. His reputation was founded on his sometimes astounding performances of Chopin, Liszt and Rachmaninov, but here, though his encore was Rachmaninov (an arrangement – perhaps his own? – of Vocalise) his programme was based upon substantial works by Beethoven, Schumann and Prokofiev.
All received revelatory performances, whether in the hyperactive, almost anarchic figuration conjured up in his left hand through the scherzo of Beethoven’s E flat Sonata Op 31 No 3, or the glittering decoration in the Andante Favori, originally intended as the central movement of the Waldstein Sonata, with which Trifonov had preceded that sonata. Likewise the barbaric intensity he conferred on the whirling treacherous chords of Schumann’s Presto Passionato, the original finale for his G minor Sonata Op 22.
The main Schumann work was the Bunte Blätter Op 99, a collection of 14 disparate miniatures dating from the late 1830s and early 1840s, which the composer published as an album in 1852. They are rarely played as a single set, but Trifonov gave them an extraordinary sense of coherence, sometimes echoing the better known cycles such as Carnaval and Kreisleriana, while elsewhere suggesting that Chopin, his studies and preludes especially, had left a mark.
Prokofiev’s Eighth Sonata, the last of his wartime trilogy of sonatas, had the second half of the recital to itself. It’s a work that keeps its fury under wraps until the last movement, and though Trifonov’s performance of the central Andante wasn’t exactly “dreamy” as its marking directs, he followed suit, even reining back during the faster, central episode of the first movement. But when the violence did erupt in the grinding dissonances of the finale, it was overwhelming.
