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I've finally listened to enough Daniil Trifonov recordings. . .

Posted by Chris from Lafayette (A) on March 12, 2015 at 18:01:41

. . . to offer at least a provisional opinion. Trifonov was the winner of the 2011 Moscow Tchaikovsky Competition and has been hailed as a new pianistic wonder by many critics and listeners. Since there was no first prize winner in 2007, Trifonv actually became the first first-prize winner of the Tchaikovsky Competition since Ayako Uehara in 2002. Unfortunately, Uehara seems not to have sustained her career, although her playing, at least for me (on the basis of her EMI Prokofiev recital), certainly did have interesting aspects to it.

All I can say about Trifonov is that, as with certain other classical pianists (Barenboim, Arrau, post-1960 Horowitz, most of Berezofsky), I'm just not on his wavelength - which really means I'm hearing flaws in his playing (whether real or imagined!). In a way, much of Trifonov's playing reminds me of post-1960 Horowitz': the same nervousness, and irregularities in rhythm and tone production. Sometimes, a performance will be described favorably as having a nervous intensity (many of Argerich's performances might qualify for that description), but that's not what I mean when I say that Trifonov exhibits nervousness. I mean that he doesn't do basic things well, such as sustain his tone through a single line, or maintain a regular rhythm as he builds phrases. A perfect example of this is his playing of the Chopin G-sharp minor Prelude (from Trifonov's Carnegie Hall recital): compared with the best other performances, Trifonov's goes by fits and starts - to be sure, these are micro fits and starts, but they're present nonetheless. When compared with pianists as diverse as Argerich, Pogorelich, Moravec, and Sokolov (all of whom maintain a consistency of tonal production and proportionate speed modifications in this work), Trifonov seems to me more of a second-tier pianist, because his deviations from rhythmic proportion and tonal regularity seem less planned and purposeful and more unplanned and fitful. Of course, Trifonov has his successes too, as in the C-sharp minor Prelude ("Chopin killing a moth" - was it Tausig who said that?), which flits by with extraordinary lightness and immediacy - and there are other very satisfying performances of a few individual Preludes too.

But my prevailing negative impression is even more firmly fixed when I listen to the Scriabin Second Sonata from the same Carnegie Hall recital: I hear slight breaks in the moonlit seascape of the first movement, owing to similar tiny rhythmic disruptions (again, these are very subtle, but I certainly feel that I'm hearing them - and their purpose eludes me). And the tremendous build of the second movement also suffers from Trifonov's tendency to tinker with things (texture, rhythm, voicing) unnecessarily, thereby undermining the cumulative power of the music. Once again, a number of very diverse pianists do this work better IMHO, including Yuja, Demidenko, Pogorelich, Mejoueva, and (at least in the first movement) Michel Block.

As if to provide an exclamation mark to all of this, Trifonov's encore, one of the Medtner Folk (or Fairy) Tales, takes fitfulness to a new level. I just don't see how Jed Distler can describe this performance as being like Golden Age pianism.

And, Andy, I have to apologize - I started to listen to Trifonov's Liszt Sonata, but, after a few minutes, I just couldn't go on - not because the performance was so bad, but because I just can't take another Liszt Sonata right now, unless it's on the order of a Khatia or Pogo (or, for something more conventional, Nojima) performance. I'll try to listen to Trifonov in this work at a later time.

In any case, Trifonov did win the Tchaikovsky Competition, and they can't take that away from. But a year previous to the Tchaikovsky Competition, in 2010, Trifonov entered the Warsaw Chopin Competition, where he placed third (actually fourth, since, with a tie for second place, there were three other pianists ranked ahead of him). My suspicion is that the Warsaw jury was correct to rank him behind the others, even though the first prize winner, Yulianna Avdeeva, has not begun her post competition career in a very compelling fashion.

No, the pianist in the 2011 Tchaikovsky Competition who should have won and gotten access to the commercial recording opportunities (again, just IMHO) was the silver medalist, South Korea's Yeol Eum Son. Now there's a real player, with finish to her playing. Some of her competition performances are available on YouTube, as well as some of her other concert performances. I would recommend her videos of the Mozart Concerto No. 21 (an actual unedited Tchaikovsky Competition performance - and despite the "vibrato as an ornment" HIP tendencies which have now even crept into the Tchaikovsky Competition of all places - Geez!), the Alkan "Le Festin d'Esope", the Prokofiev Sonata No. 8, a troika of Kapustin Etudes, and this video below (which I'll embed - I hope it works!) of the Kapustin Variations:




As you can see, as an added bonus, she's quite the babe too! (BTW, I do not recommend her video of Beethoven's Op. 111 Sonata because of the substandard SQ - very distracting.)

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Kimber Kable

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