Ordinarily, the main attraction of this London Symphony Orchestra concert under Daniel Harding would have been Mahler’s Seventh symphony, a special-occasion piece which is still relatively rarely performed compared with its peers. But this was also Daniil Trifonov’s much anticipated first appearance in London since before the pandemic. The buzz among a capacity Barbican audience about the celebrated Russian pianist’s return was palpable.
Trifonov did not disappoint. Under his hands, the reading of Robert Schumann’s A minor piano concerto was searchingly individual in the very best sense, with Trifonov illuminating the muscularity of Schumann’s piano writing as well as its delicate poetry. Trifonov unquestionably commands the restraint of dynamics that Schumann’s scoring requires from the soloist – his passagework was exemplary. But he was unafraid of making weightier keyboard statements too, even in the opening bars and especially in the first movement cadenza.
There was a similar integration of lyricism and vigour in the later movements. The intermezzo was exquisitely weighted, with well judged accompaniment from Harding and the LSO, before the explosions of the finale. This concerto is sometimes depicted as an outright rejection of the Romantic masculine virtuoso tradition, but Trifonov’s account was more nuanced and three-dimensional than that, looking forward to the concertos of Brahms and beyond.
After the interval, Harding delivered a press-on performance of Mahler’s extraordinary and extravagant Seventh. This is music that teeters on the edge, but the opening movement felt generally too fast and too hard-driven to capture the score’s underlying bleakness. The three hallucinatory middle movements were another matter. Full of instrumental innovation and a sense of actual and impending disintegration at every turn, all were well judged by Harding and often brilliantly played by the LSO, among whom Eivind Ringstad’s solo viola deserves a special mention for its idiomatically Mahlerian mix of eeriness and sweetness. Then it was back to propulsion, as the finale careered to a conclusion that was suitably jubilant and manic at the same time.
