Friday, April 27, 2012

Daniil Trifonov Review


Daniil Trifonov
Bennett-Gordon Hall, Ravinia
August 19, 2012. 6:30pm

Scriabin
•Sonata 3, Op. 23

Medtner
•Fairy Tale in A minor, Op. 51/2
•Fairy Tale in E flat major, Op. 26/1
•Fairy Tale in B flat minor, Op. 26/2

Stravinsky-Agosti
•Three Dances from The Firebird

Intermission

Debussy
•Images, Book 1

Chopin
•12 Etudes, Op. 25

Encores
•Chopin: Etude in C major, op. 10/1
•Chopin: Etude in A minor, op. 10/2
•Chopin: Etude in E major, op. 10/3
•Strauss-Trifonov: Overture to Die Fledermaus

The concert on that evening was sold out. Rather, almost sold out. I was told that there were under 10 seats left at the box office. I don't know how the majority of people there found out about Mr. Trifonov, but my first experience was watching him play the opus 10 Chopin Etudes during the Chicago Piano Day at the CSO's Symphony Center. In that first performance, since there was no program, I thought he was just going to play a handful of varied selections, but it wasn't until he got to around Op. 10/5 that I realized, “oh man, he's going to play them all”. Things I noticed during that performance included original approaches to phrasing, a natural “I play this passage the way that is most relaxed and comfortable to my hand” approach to the technical demands, and a polish that says “every moment here can be phrased this way or that to be made beautiful,” it was a polish that said “I won't just take the easy approach and leave the piece's projection to simply bringing out the melody.” I came away from that performance wanting to hear Mr. Trifonov again.

This concert at Ravinia was almost everything I had hoped for. Almost.

Things I want to hear in a concert are:
1. Interesting programming
2. Strong musicianship from the performers
3. Honesty, integrity, maturity, and a pleasant concert manner

The Scriabin sonata had a full scope of colors as well as many different colors of agitation, if that makes sense. If I had to describe them, I'd say sometimes tumultuous, sometimes murky, other times tempestuous, seismic in other places, and rippling often came to mind. I loved it. I know enough to know that it's only because of Scriabin's writing that those shades of shading are possible, but I also know it takes a sensitive, diligent artist not to steamroll over all those subtleties and actually make such nuances heard.

I didn't like his take on the rhythm of the opening of the sonata. (I've played that piece, so I know what Scriabin wrote on the page.) A lot of people like to take exaggerations of his notated rhythms, and as a composer and as a scrupulous performer, I take offense to that. Mr. Trifonov wasn't the first person to take a dotted-eighth-followed-by-a-sixteenth rhythm and morph it into a series of quarters and crushed apoggiaturas and I'm sure he won't be the last, but he did it on the very first note . Granted, some people might justify that, calling it part of the volando effect for which Scriabin is well known, but I wasn't excited that the first note he played in his recital was a distortion.

His Medtner was technically sound, soulful and suitably volatile when the music called for it. Rhapsody, repose and restrained pathos were all there, and he deserves our thanks for his performance of those pieces.

The Stravinsky-Agosty was fun. I think they were a bit flamboyant and overblown, and they struck me as a very puerile effort to get an audience to jump to their feet. The first one was very intense and impressive, and was what one might call hyperdramatic. The Berceuse was pleasant, but forgettable. The last one was an amusing romp that made me want to laugh out loud. The movement wasn't funny per se, it was just such a dramatic contrast to the serious music making of earlier that the bathos left me with no option but to laugh. Roger Ebert once said that the only thing Mel Brooks didn't do to make us laugh in Blazing Saddles was hit us over the head with a rubber chicken. For me, this over-the-top hedonism was like rubber chicken rain.

His Debussy had the veiled quality that a lot of Debussy playing aspires to, and he gave us our share of muted colors, but I felt his interpretation was lacking in bright colors. I'm not going to call Debussy an impressionist composer, but I know he wanted his music to have variety. Maybe Mr. Trifonov didn't think the music ever got “bright” very much and that's why he never let it become so, but after the three pieces of the suite, I was left feeling a wanting for something. This was especially apparent in the first piece, Reflections in the Water.

In the Chopin etudes, the final section of the concert, I saw outstanding interpretations all the way up until number six, the etude in double thirds in G sharp minor. Until then, his playing was incisive, clear, and extremely accurate with regards to pitches and rhythms. In the etude in thirds, he took the tempo too fast or something, because his thirds weren't clean. That's what the etude is for, and it wasn't there.

I was looking forward to C sharp minor etude; The ending is a taxing test of a person's musicianship, and it has a breathtaking close. His rendering was beautifully proportioned, but when he got to the end, Chopin's anaphora fell flat in his hands.

The G flat etude was delightfully played, full of fire and jubilation. The octave etude that came after it was par.

The Winter Wind etude was fine, but he rushed through the ending and finished with a sloppy scale and a weird, sloppy release of the pedal that made you think he had completely lost control of his faculties. Then he played the C minor etude as though he forgot to give every measure four beats. Through the last 70% of the piece he consistently chopped a little bit off the end of each measure, starting each successive measure ahead of the beat.

I'm sure someone thinks that's exciting, but I found it wearisome, tacky, and a bad surprise. From the moment I first saw him and throughout most of the recital, I thought he was sincere and serious about serious music making. In the last half of those Chopin etudes it seems that he just tossed all that integrity to the wind in favor of generating excitement through the use of cheap tricks. Anyone can do that. Anyone can rush to “create excitement”. Anyone can make ostentatious errors to simulate in-the-heat-of-the-moment “spontaneity”. That's not hard. I expected more of this young man.

In his first encore, he was better. He was back to his earlier good form. In the second (perhaps the hardest of all the etudes) he did what he did in the etude in thirds, he took it too fast, and gave a version of how the right hand was supposed to go. The third etude was melodious and much better–although at this point my attention was changing to concern that he had just played through 15 Chopin etudes, and I was worried that he still had 9 more!

His fourth encore (his own transcription, sadly) can only be described as loud, long and jejune.

I came away from the performance with a mixture of satisfaction and disappointment. He got a standing ovation and played four encores. He would have played more–we could see the stage door open temporarily for him to come back out, and then close again–but he didn't. The stage got rushed by a handful of women (some bearing flowers) who wanted programs signed, and when he came out into the lobby, the crowd of people waiting there can only be described as a mob. Mr. Trifonov whipped that audience into a frenzy that night. From my point of view, based on his program selections and his performances, he did it by catering to the basest human instinct: our love and fear of danger; teetering himself between of failure and success, order and disarray, the people that night got to see a player on the brink of disaster, and they saw him make it out alive. I saw a young man who danced near the edge, while playing it safe. Then I saw that young man fill in the gap with artifice to distract us from the fact that he was playing it safe.

What I don't like is that his antics of the last part of the concert (Chopin etude 6 and beyond) make me question all of his prior performance. Was he being insincere the whole time? Were those beautiful Medtner pieces just a group of artful lies? Could he really have been an honest player then, at that point and then chosen to turn on his Charlatan Button when the time was right? I suppose there can be many competing motives and desires within an artist, and maybe that's what we saw. Maybe this is immaturity manifest, and this is how talented young people are–scrupulous and studious except for when they're being impulsive, careless and brash.

So, how does he score on my three points?

1. 9.5/10
2. For the first half of the concert, up until Op. 25/6, 9.5/10. For the rest of the concert, 5.
3. I have no idea. Can someone be inconsistently sincere? Or consistently insincere?
I don't know what will happen to this young man over the years. I'll watch him again to see what he does. I shouldn't have any problem though, Ravinia will hire him back. They'd be fools not to.

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Richard Goode Review


Richard Goode, piano
CSO Symphony Center
March 4, 2012

Schumann
•Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood), Op. 15

Brahms
•Seven Fantasies, Op. 116

Intermission

Chopin
•Nocturne in E flat, Op. 55/2
•Scherzo in C sharp minor, Op. 39
•Waltz in A flat, Op. 64/3
•Waltz in C sharp minor, Op. 64/2
•Waltz in F, Op. 34/3
•Ballade in A flat, Op. 47


I jumped at the opportunity to see Richard Goode at Symphony Center when I first heard he would be playing back before the beginning of the 2011-2012 season. But recently, when I saw that he wasn't going to be playing any Beethoven on the program for last Sunday's concert, I was a little disappointed. I don't think I need to bore anyone on here with Richard Goode's history with Beethoven, but I will say that he is part of the echelon of pianists who have performed and recorded all 32 Beethoven sonatas, and a few years ago when he was doing clinics at Northwestern, I saw his master class of Beethoven opus 109, and I was satisfied with what he brought.

The first time I heard him play that piece, I would describe his playing as a bit rough hewn–he handled the broad strokes of piano technique, but the superfine precision and resolute clarity in the minutia of intricate passagework wasn't as present as it is in many of the performers currently on the stage. Nonetheless, since Beethoven presents some of the most challenging musical problems in the piano repertoire, and I found his interpretations of Beethoven compelling, I obtained a ticket for his recital perforce, irrespective of his inclusion of Beethoven in his programming.

The Schumann Kinderszenen were beautifully performed. Goode's phrasing in these pieces was very very good. His sense of timing in moving from one piece to the next was well balanced, and though many of the pieces in this set are at slow or moderate speeds, the few fast ones were executed with wonderful clarity in the difficult parts. 

I heard him play these Brahms pieces when he was back at Northwestern in 2008, and I was not disappointed here. Again, there was vigor, boldness, tenderness and a lot of dark, strong colors in his playing–in short, exactly what I want these Brahms pieces to sound like.

His Chopin group was good, but in most terms, I've heard better; in spots, the nocturne didn't have enough dynamic space between the layers to sound cohesive, so it gave the impression of being cluttered, and he rushed the climaxes instead of letting us (his audience) luxuriate in them. Save the sonatas, the ballades and scherzi were some of the biggest pieces of Chopin's output for solo piano, and for a big piece at the end of his program, the A flat ballade didn't sound nearly epic enough; there was hardly any scope. The waltzes were played nicely, but there wasn't any "flutter" in them at all. Don't get me wrong, this is world class playing, but he didn't capture the lightness in these pieces that I think they want. 

Interesting, in some of the most musically demanding repertoire, Goode is among the best of the best, but his Chopin waltzes still came off as earthbound.

Lastly, (and ironically for this review), he didn't end with the C sharp minor scherzo, the only piece that showed any obvious instrumental display. It was big, dashing, and had an opportunity to show off one's octaves (in my experience, octaves are always a crowd pleaser), but he sandwiched it between a 3 waltzes and a nocturne. It may have been a noble experiment in terms of programming, but it didn't work for me; it left the end of the program, with the waltzes and the Ballade, feeling like a monument to anticlimax.

While I'm at it, I think I can say that though the first half of the concert was lovely to listen to, I grew tired of the series of miniatures Goode served up. It was like the concert was composed of two first-halves of two concerts. When we returned from intermission, the only thing we had to greet us was a handful of Chopin miniatures. I don't know why he chose to program a concert like this–almost all short pieces, and the few more extended works ordered in such a way as to give a sense of incompleteness. 

Perhaps for a renown Beethoven interpreter who established himself as a master of the largest of forms, this was his way to show us that he could master the short and delightful aspects of music as well as the serious and epic. Maybe he just wanted to play these pieces because he liked them, and thought he'd try something different from the usual concert programming standard. 

As an aside, Ruth Slenczynska, a musician of towering importance, once advised that a program can be composed of many shorter pieces, but that one should avoid putting too many familiar, sure-fire pieces on a program or the audience will become bored, like I did; a mixture is best. He showed us lots of beautiful sound and a variety of moods in his choices, but for what it's worth, when I come to see a concert at Symphony Center, I'm not alone in expecting to be impressed. Granted, those octaves in the Scherzo were nice but they were brief. I don't want a concert composed exclusively of fire and brimstone pieces, but I want some–a little spice in what I go to hear. He brought many flavors, but the music never got "hot" so to speak. 

Enough conjecture, I'll leave you with the obligatory play on words with the man's last name: In short, Goode was good, but his programming wasn't. 

p.s. Oh, while I'm at it, I have a question: What could a person be hoping to accomplish by putting this up as their publicity photo? This was an insert advertising to Meet Richard Goode after the concert. I can only imagine he didn't want anyone to show up.