Concert Review: A Farewell to Childhood

Daniil Trifonov returns to Carnegie Hall.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Daniil Trifonov in performance at the Verbier Festival.
Photo by Nicolas Brodard © 2016 The Verbier Festival.

To track the evolution of an artist is an extraordinary thing. For the Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov. Mr. Trifonov made his Carnegie Hall debut at 22. On Wednesday night he returned to that famous venue with a blazing recital that indicates his evolution from boy virtuoso to an extraordinary, adult artist. Adding to the sense of the occasion were cameras from medici.tv, making the performance available for viewing by an international audience (for free through March 7, 2017.)

Concert Review: The Family That Plays Together

The 5 Browns Debut at Carnegie Hall.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Waiting for their Steinways: The 5 Browns perch on a piano.
Image © 2013 The 5 Browns.

The piano transcription has always been the unloved middle child of the keyboard repertory. Sometimes, playing an orchestral work can reveal harmonic complexities or make the composer's intent clearer to the ear. Other transcriptions can drain a work of its vitality and reduce orchestral colors to mere dexterity and flash.


Both of those extremes were on display on Friday night at Carnegie Hall, which saw the debut of sibling pianists The 5 Browns on the main stage of that historic auditorium. These Utah-raised, Juilliard-educated pianists (Desirae, Deondra, Gregory, Melody and Ryan) offered a program that was almost entirely composed of piano transcriptions, featuring their signature sound of five Steinway concert grands, nosed up against each other in a vast circle of keys, hammers and strings.

Concert Review: Five Thousand Fingers

Daniil Trifonov makes his Carnegie Hall recital debut.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Daniil Trifonov. Photo © 2012 Decca Classics.

For any young musician making their way in the world of classical music, a first solo recital at Carnegie Hall is a big deal. For the young Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov, who started his lessons at the age of five and now makes his first solo appearance at the legendary concert venue at the age of 21, the stakes on Tuesday night were huge.

For this program, Mr. Trifonov chose a program balancing standard repertory with the flashy musicianship one hopes to see from a promising young piano-slinger. With long, seemingly boneless fingers and a keen musical mind, Mr. Trifonov has formidable physical tools that allow him to follow in his country's long tradition of pianistic skill. This concert was his chance to show that he is the next potential carrier of that flame.

The concert opened with Alexander Scriabin's dream-like Sonata-Fantasie, a piece with contrasting slow and fast movements. Mr. Trifonov hunched his lanky frame over the keys, seeming to burn with concentration as he drew this composer's unique, diaphanous textures out in the slow movement. Notes peeped through the gossamer of sound, coalescing into themes. In the second movement, the left hand rhythms were played with an almost over-eager drive, propelling the work's rhythm to a blazing finish.

Concert Review: Serious Moonlight

Evgeny Kissin at Carnegie Hall.

Evgeni Kissin, holding the score of
Scriabin's 24 Preludes.

by Paul Pelkonen

Evgeny Kissin has been a fixture on the international concert scene for the past three decades, ever since the Russian pianist made his debut in the Soviet Union at the age of 12. This season's recital at Carnegie Hall (on Wednesday night) featured the artist's take on familiar sonatas by Beethoven and Chopin, bracketing Samuel Barber's brilliant entry in that genre.

Mr. Kissin opened the concert with a treat for his listeners, the Moonlight Sonata. The opening was played at a glacial speed, with audience members closing their eyes in rapt ecstasy at Beethoven's deceptively simple opening figures. The movement also provided occasion for disapproving murmurs and the occasional acid glare, as listeners chose to express their displeasure at their raptures being disturbed.

Mr. Kissin seemed to show more poetic enthusiasm for the two movements that followed, a lilting dance figure that shows Beethoven at his most light-hearted and the pell-mell finale, taken at a dangerous speed that would be ill-advised for a pianist of lesser gifts. 

If the Moonlight sonata caused raptures in the sold-out house, then Samuel Barber's crystalline, acerbic sonata set the listeners on edge. Barber's piece was two years in its creation, and was premiered in 1949 by Vladimir Horowitz. Although this is a largely tonal sonata, the ideas behind it descent from the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg and Webern. The work opens with an initial tone-row that serves as the seed from which the four movements bloom. 

Mr. Kissin played this challenging work with emotion and dexterity, guiding his audience through the complex dissonant Scherzo and the Adagio mesto, an emotional slow movement. The sonata ended with a complex, contrapuntal fugue. When the interweaving themes resolved themselves back into the opening tone-row, it was a triumphant moment for composer and soloist.

The soloist brought the same serious purpose to the Chopin that followed: the A flat Nocturne and the Sonata No. 3. The Nocturne was lush and sensual, played with warm tonal colors that cast the spell of stillness once more upon the audience. The smaller piece also served as an effective slow introduction to the grand gestures of Chopin's final Sonata. 

Chopin is revered as the composer whose output shattered the traditional classical ideal of the multi-movement work for solo keyboard. However, this last sonata is one of his most traditional and classical in structure, with four broad movements and the audible influence of Johann Sebastian Bach. Mr. Kissin played with a rich flow of notes, leaning on the sustain pedal to create glissando effects up and down the keyboard that dazzled the audience and nearly caused early outbursts of applause.

The encore featured more Chopin (the A minor Mazurka) and a Beethoven rarity: the Six Variations in D Major. This latter piece Beethoven allowed Mr. Kissin to display a vast spectra of pianistic colors, from playful dances to martial figures that stirred. The encore ended with one last playful March, from The Love of Three Oranges by Serge Prokofiev. Not even the powerful unison clapping from the packed house could draw the soloist back for a fourth.