Russian Week 2: Electric Partnership of MTT and Daniil Trifonov
/By Truman C. Wang
12/21/2019
Photo credit: San Francisco Symphony
The Russians are back at L.A. Phil, with even more thrills and excitement than last week. Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas (affectionately known as MTT) showed his Russian heritage in the brash and colorful opening march of Rimsky-Korsakov’s march Dubinushka, whetting the audience’s appetite for the Tchaikovsky concerto. MTT will be retiring from the San Francisco Symphony next season and moving to So Cal to become (one hope) a fixture in the classical music scene here.
To describe 28-year-old Daniil Trifonov as classical music’s brightest young star pianist is in a sense to do him a disservice, for he is above all an artist. In his eagerly awaited return to the Disney Hall he gave us a Tchaikovsky B-flat Minor Piano Concerto of spine-tingling brilliance, poetry and vivacity. This is the Tchaikovsky you have always known, one of the most familiar of all concertos, rekindled in all its first glory, brimming over with zest and shorn of all the clichés that have adhered to it over the years. Sitting at the edge of the piano bench and literally letting his long hair down, Trifonov thundered out the octaves of the first movement like a giant carillon, while the Andantino’s central prestissimo became in such extraordinary hands a true firefly scherzo. The fiery finale, Allegro con fuoco, was the veritable “tornado from the Steppes of a young Horowitz” that I missed in the playing of last week’s Korean pianist. Incredibly, conductor MTT kept a tight rein on this indomitable Russian bear of a pianist, and the two proved an electric partnership. Trifonov’s Steinway, its lid fully open, was a protean, gorgeously-tuned instrument that produced a big sound of astonishing clarity and colors. The encore, Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise”, sounded positively sensuous on this Steinway.
Aaron Copland (1900-1990), the greatest composer and educator in American classical music, came from a diverse background: Russian immigrant parents, a French teacher, jazz –all find their way into his compositions. What emerges is quintessentially American. A sense of the great outdoors (the Appalachians are never far away) and pride of the homestead can all be heard in his Third Symphony, written during the fecund decade of 1940’s that also saw “Rodeo”, “Appalachian Spring”, “Fanfare for the Common Man”, plus two major film scores. In writing the symphony during the war years (1944-46), Copland was out to prove he could write a large-scale work as well as the Russians (Both Shostakovich and Prokofiev had written their fifth symphonies around the same time.) In fact, the third movement is practically identical to the third movement of Shostakovich’s Fifth (Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right?) Out of its postwar context, Copland’s Third Symphony symbolizes the optimism of the new American century. MTT, an American music advocate and Copland specialist, gave an impassioned, impressive reading of this 43-minute symphony, culminating in the fabulous trumpets of the L.A. Phil blaring out the “Fanfare for the Common Man” finale.
Great art may not solve the world’s problems. For two hours at least, we could all be inspired to do better, or pretend, as Shakespeare does, that “all’s well that ends well.”
Truman C. Wang is Editor-in-Chief of Classical Voice, whose articles have appeared in the Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, other Southern California publications, as well as the Hawaiian Chinese Daily. He studied Integrative Biology and Music at U.C. Berkeley.