Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov returned to La Jolla to play a pair of solo recitals Wednesday and Thursday, a celebrity opening of the La Jolla Music Society’s 2025–26 season. I attended a pair of operas at San Francisco Opera the first half of that week, including their revival of Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, an opera the company commissioned and premiered 25 years ago, and which has become the most frequently performed contemporary opera.
So I missed Trifonov’s Wednesday recital, but returned to San Diego in time to hear his Thursday offering, a program featuring works by Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky and Robert Schumann. Although the Tchaikovsky Piano Concertos are top drawer scores in the orchestral repertory, as a composer of solo piano music, Tchaikovsky is arguably a lesser light.
Trifonov opened with Tchaikovsky’s Sonata in C-sharp Minor, Opus Posth. 80, a work written at age 15 when the composer was still a conservatory student. Tchaikovsky never published this early sonata, but after his death it was discovered among his papers and then published. If the opening “Allegro con fuoco” is not exactly furious, it is replete with brilliant flourishes and floating, evanescent melodies that Trifonov delivered with bravura elegance.
The second movement, “Andante,” offers a wistful, slightly tentative theme that develops into a Lisztian fantasy built over an ominous ascending bass line. A pair of driving “Allegro vivo” movements completes this sonata, ideal vehicles for Trifonov’s muscular technical prowess and gleaming legato themes.
Robert Schumann’s Piano Sonata No. 1 in F-sharp Minor, Op. 11, is also a youthful work, although Schumann was in his mid-twenties when he completed this sonata, and his level of structural sophistication easily surpasses that of Tchaikovsky’s early piano sonata. Trifonov made Schumann’s dramatic motifs and assertive cross-hand figurations in the first two movements appear as easy as executing a C major scale. His bracing, ebullient motifs made the “Scherzo” thrilling, and his rhapsodic account of the “Finale” indulged the technical panache that his devoted, enthusiastic audiences expect.
The only thing that amazed me about Tchaikovsky’s Children’s Album, Op. 39, was encountering such modest music on a Trifonov program. Like Robert Schumann’s more familiar collection Scenes from Childhood, Tchaikovsky wrote his set of some 24 short vignettes for children. And while Trifonov delivered this assortment of songs, dances, and sketches of children’s toys with thoughtful detail, devoting one-third of his program to such slight music is questionable.
His encores were two short selections from Sergey Prokofiev’s Visions fugitives. Perhaps if he had programmed that complete work in the middle of his recital and given us a pair from Tchaikovsky’s Children’s Album as encores, it would have proved more rewarding.
This recital was presented by the La Jolla Music Society at the Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center in downtown La Jolla on September 25, 2025.