Arts & Events

Russian-born pianist Danil Trifonov never fails to astonish me. Only once in the many times I’ve heard him dd he disappoint, and that was not Trifonov’s fault but rather that of composer 

Mason Bates, whose Piano Concerto, dedicated to Danil Trifonov, I found utterly sophomoric and devoid of serious interest. But when Trifonov tackles works such as Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit, Rachmaninof’s Piano Concertos, works by Bach, Chopin, Beethoven, or Prokofiev, well, the pianistic pyrotechnics are spectacularly noteworthy! 

On Sunday, February 23, I attended a matinee performance at Davies Hall in which Danil Trifonov performed Sergei Prokofiev’s fiendishly difficult Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor with the Sym- phony conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. Originally written in 1913 but substantially revised by Prokofiev in 1923, this is an extremely demanding work for the piano soloist.To say that Danil Trifonov brought it off splendidly would hardly do justice to his astonishing performance. In the opening movement, an extended cavatina featured Trifonov in a dazzling, dizzying display of rapid-fire hand passages, including many cross-hand maneuvers. The second movement, a scherzo, featured Trifonov in a whirlwind of perpetual motion. In the third movement, the basses moaned ominously, then offered pizzicato accompaniment. The fourth and final movement gave Trifonov multiple opportunities to display his sensitivity to dynamics, as he slowly built from soft, delicate passages to ever more emphatic and outspoken bravado, including several passages of devilishly difficult rapid-fire pyrotechnics in which his hands fairly flew in astonishing fashion. 

At the close of this Prokofiev concerto, the audience gave Danil Trifonov a tumultuous standing ovation, bringing him back onstage numerous times to acknowledge the applause. Then Trifonov offered as encore Prokofiev’s Gavotte from CINDERELLA, Op. 95, No. 2.  

Let me now give short-shrift to the work that opened this program, Strange Beasts, by composer Xavier Muzik, who came onstage wearing work overalls to introduce his work. This multi-media work was commissioned by SF Symphony’s Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, and was in line with Salonen’s initially stated commitment upon coming to San Francisco that he intended to pursue multi-media works, a choice I sharply criticised from his outset here. Muzik’s Strange Beasts offers little other than bizarre musical dissonance while Muzik’s own quirky photographs of street scenes in Los Angeles are projected on a large screen. Often these photographs are pro- jected upside-down or at side-angles, adding to the arbitrary strangeness of this 17-minute eccentric exercise in self-indulgence. After intermission, this program’s final work was Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, which provoked a riot at its premiere in Paris on May 29, 1913. Having now heard many times this work, called in English The Rite of Spring, I no longer find its unrelenting percussive quality nearly as strident as when I first heard it many years ago. Indeed, I recently attended a remarkable per- formance of Pina Bausch’s choreography of The Rite of Soring involving 18 male and 18 female African dancers, thus transfforming Stravinsky’s primitive Russian folk ritual into a more or less contemporary African ritual dance. In any case, this SF Symphony performance of The Rite of Spring conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen was robust, to be sure, though it contained several silent pauses in Part II: The Great Sacrifice, that I don’t recall hearing in the many previous per formances I’ve encountered of this work. I actually find these silent pauses inappropriate in a work I’ve always thought of as unrelenting in its percussive propulsion leading to a deadly climax. 

ERRATA: In my review of Julia Bullock and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, I erroneously stated that this was this orchestra’s first US tour. Cal Performances informs me that they hosted this rchestra in February 2018. My apologies for this error.