Paul Bodine is impressed by the engrossing pianism of Daniil Trifonov
The global phenomenon that is Daniil Trifonov has become something of a San Diego regular. After his career-making Tchaikovsky Competition win in 2011, the Russian debuted locally in La Jolla Music Society’s emerging-artist ‘Discovery Series’ in 2012, played with Gidon Kremer in La Jolla in 2015, then performed as a soloist in 2015, 2016, and 2019, before returning yet again in 2021 and 2022. Acknowledging his putative status as ‘without question the most astounding pianist of our age’ (The Times), San Diego’s La Jolla Music Society invited Trifonov to inaugurate its fifty-seventh year as the headlining soloist of two season-opening recitals.
Those not yet convinced of the New York-based Trifonov’s ‘prima inter pares’ status could at least be intrigued by his unusual first-half program on 24 September 2025 at Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center: two works by compatriots who almost never get air time in American concert halls – Sergei Taneyev (his Prelude and Fugue in G-sharp minor) and Nikolai Miaskovsky (Piano Sonata No 2 in F-sharp minor). They bookended Prokofiev‘s Visions fugitives which, though performed in the US, is only rarely recorded in its entirety by elite pianists (eg Stephen Osborne, Ollie Mustonen, Boris Berman; greats such as Richter and Gilels have recorded only selections).
Even more intriguingly, Trifonov played his three countrymen’s works as a single uninterrupted piece. If this was to highlight their shared nationality and/or chronology – all were composed within seven years of each other, as Russia bloodily morphed into the Soviet Union – it was not for their musical similarity (except perhaps in their brooding harmonic color).
Any audience members geopolitically discomfited by the Russia-heavy program could take comfort that the apolitical Taneyev aligned himself with European musical tradition against the ‘Mighty Five’s’ nationalism. Miaskovsky eschewed explicit political content both in his compositions and public comments, even bravely refusing to sign a letter of apology to Stalin after the Zhdanov crackdown of 1948. Even Prokofiev – who returned to Soviet Russia for good in 1936 and dutifully composed several patriotic works – privately mocked Soviet cultural ideology, never saw his Spanish wife again after her banishment to a gulag after the Zhdanov Decree, and, his health and finances under pressure, died a premature death five years later.
Trifonov is a joy to hear and watch – his dauntingly fluid, yet highly articulated finger work was displayed up close on a screen above.
Nose bent over the keyboard, he plays with involving intensity, throwing off dramatic arm flourishes, pouncing on keys, rocking to body-English rhythms.
Trifonov’s jaw-dropping facility, graceful economy of motion, gorgeous sonority and instinct for the drama in any piece made the best possible case for Taneyev’s Prelude and Fugue. But while he obeyed Taneyev’s ‘espressivo’ in the Prelude, he paid less fealty to his ‘cantabile’ and ‘dolce’ instructions. To the manic Fugue, Trifonov brought all the ‘fire’ (con fuoco) Taneyev could wish for. But where the fastest recordings clock in at 7:30, Trifonov dispatched it in 6:22. Whew.
Though Prokofiev himself acknowledged Visions fugitives was not an integral piece by performing only selections in concert, Trifonov’s storytelling charisma made it all somehow cohere, an agitated, engrossing dreamscape made hypnotizing, intimate, even fun. But never expansive: Trifonov played it a minute-and-a-quarter faster than any recorded version except those by Osborne and Mustonen.
Against Taneyev’s contrapuntal frenzy and Prokofiev’s French-tinged modernism, Trifonov projected Miaskovsky as some kind of tormented post-Romantic, rhapsodic waves breaking over brutal chording – Rachmaninov gone mad. With wide dynamic range and precise control, Trifonov delivered an intense, riveting but occasionally over-the-top performance (and quicker than any recorded version). As he raced on and off stage for quick bows before San Diegans’ roaring approval, Trifonov seemed a man in a hurry.
Robert Schumann‘s first piano sonata shifted the evening’s program onto familiar turf. As if to dramatize the mental instability that condemned Schumann to an asylum and early death, Trifonov used his sixth sense for music’s dramatic jugular to emphasize the Jekyll-and-Hyde battle between Schumann’s Florestan and Eusebius musical personae. The gentle, aching lyricism he brought to the Eusebius music was superb, the second-movement Aria exquisite. Florestan’s surging, tempestuous music was thrilling yet sometimes felt rushed and over indexed.
If the highest praise a pianist can merit is that they make music sound new, Trifonov could well be ‘the most astounding pianist of our age’. Judging by the rapturous adulation the La Jolla audience showed him, he must be the most entertaining. His effective encores were Tchaikovsky’s ‘Silver Fairy’ (from Act III of Tchaikovsky‘s Sleeping Beauty) and ‘Sweet Dreams’ – a sample of the twenty-four Tchaikovsky Children’s Album pieces at the heart of Trifonov’s 25 September 2025 recital in this same hall.