Trifonov/LSO/Rattle - Rameau, Ravel, Poulenc, and Jolas, 17 February 2019

Barbican Hall

Rameau: Les Indes galantes: Suite

Ravel: Piano Concerto in G major

Betsy Jolas: A Little Summer Suite

Poulenc: Les Biches: Suite

Ravel: La Valse

Daniil Trifonov (piano)

London Symphony Orchestra

Simon Rattle (conductor)

An evening of French delights from Simon Rattle and the LSO? Certainly, even if some – not necessarily those one might have expected – delighted more than others. First among not-quite-equals stood the earliest and latest works: a dance suite from Rameau’s Les Indes galantes and a parallel Little Summer Suite, composed in 2015 by Betsy Jolas for Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic.

One silly, at least borderline offensive, newspaper ‘article’ and a host of tedious imitators notwithstanding, Betsy Jolas and her music have not recently been ‘discovered’. Her music deserves to be better known, more frequently performed; that, however, is a different matter entirely. The best response to such nonsense is to do what Rattle and the LSO did here: perform it – and perform it with such excellence. Seven vividly etched miniatures abound with echoes and correspondences, but does not all music when one is acquainting oneself with it? A few Messiaenesque harmonies, even the odd marriage of rhythm and instrumentation recalling Boulez’s Notations, speak not of overt ‘influence’ but perhaps of kinship – and what kinship. The scoring is much sparer than that for the latter. Although the orchestral forces are relatively large – certainly not so large as Boulez’s – the writing is more often ensemble-like. Four of the movements echo – consciously, I presume – Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. ‘Strolling’ movements – ‘Strolling away’, ‘Strolling about’, ‘Strolling under’, and finally, ‘Strolling home’ – they offer continuity and connection; a dark, menacing, almost nineteenth-century Russian bass suggests that honoured predecessor, before taking in Ligetian ‘Knocks and clocks’, responsorial (to that) ‘Shakes and quakes’ and similarly post-liturgical ‘Chants and cheers’, suspended, it seems, in musical mid-air. Succinct, witty, with a nonchalant sign-off suggestive, as noted in Jeremy Thurlow’s booklet note, of Debussy’s Jeux, one was left wanting more, yet admiring of the taste and judgement that had the music end when it did.

The very opening of Jolas’s suite had, at least in context, intriguingly echoed the chains of Rameau’s opening ‘Air pour les esclaves africains’. If Rameau’s (relative) battery of percussion veered in danger of the wearisome, taken out of dramatic context (for a review of a Munich performance of the entire work, click here), the relief of such enlightened Baroque music-making was eminently worth the slight wait. Each of the five movements danced with colour, grace, and a refreshing lack of doctrinaire ‘authenticity’. String vibrato was withdrawn at the opening of the ‘Air pour l’adoration du soleil’, but with good reason, that anticipation prefiguring sunrises in Haydn (both The Creation and The Seasons). The most celebrated number, the ‘Air pour les sauvages’, proceeded with splendid swing. It may be problematic to our postcolonial minds, yet it is far from unprogressive by Enlightenment standards. The closing Chaconne stood, rightly, worlds away from our one-sided notions of the dance, too influenced by Bach and his Romantic successors. The world of Les Indes Galantes, not unlike the Tiepolo frescoes for the stairwell of Würzburg’s Balthasar Neumann Residenz, present a Eurocentric world, to be sure, but one that attempts to embrace, even in small way to elevate, other cultures as surely as did Montesquieu and Voltaire. Trumpets and drums rejoiced, without effacing a tenderness that spoke both to Rameau’s age and our own. For all Rattle’s evident, longstanding belief in ‘period’ performance practice, this did not sound so very distant from the Rameau of forebears such as Raymond Leppard and Jean-François Paillard – and was all the better for such kinship.

Daniil Trifonov joined the orchestra, post-Rameau, for Ravel’s G major Piano Concerto. He appeared transfixed at the opening. Whose spell? Ravel’s or his own? It was unclear, as was much of the rest of his performance. There were delights aplenty in such pellucid pianism, but much of the first movement was indulgent, lacking line and, on occasion, connection with Rattle’s – and the LSO’s – able accompaniment. Harp-led washes of sound were duly gorgeous, likewise woodwind solos seemingly harking back to the Rameau we had just heard, but Trifonov appeared oblivious, pursuing instead, so it seemed, his own rêveries. The slow movement nevertheless proved bewitching. Here, Trifonov’s exquisite modulation of dynamics, silken touch, and above all, endlessly long-breathed phrasing were quite the match for Ravel’s not entirely un-self-regarding writing. There was here a chamber intimacy, pent up with emotion that never quite dared speak its name that revealed darker undercurrents than I can hitherto recall: a tragic Tombeau de Rameau composed before our ears. If only the first movement and an often oddly-balanced – at least from my seat – finale had matched such extraordinary music-making. Still, Trifonov’s closing exuberance reaped its own rewards – even if he again occasionally parted company from the orchestra. What I believe to have been his own transcription from Rachmaninov’s cantata, The Bells, made for a richly exploratory encore.

Poulenc’s Les biches, here given in suite form, has its admirers. Love much of Poulenc’s music though I do, I cannot help but find much of this ballet music somewhat thin gruel. At any rate, it is very much a period piece. Rattle and the LSO did what they could to point up Stravinskian correspondences, the opening of the ‘Andantino’ very much a case in point, likewise the Pulcinella-like writing of the ‘Final’. (If only the latter benefited from Stravinsky’s – and Pergolesi (attrib.)’s – concision. At its best, for instance in the opening ‘Rondeau’, there was a charming air of an imaginary vieille France: not Rameau’s, but why should it be? Ravel’s La Valse proved a similarly mixed bag: not, of course, as work, but as performance. Rattle certainly captured the dark strangeness of the opening, likewise a later, hallucinogenic nausea to the strings. I was less convinced, though, by the driven, almost vulgar quality to climaxes and other passages. A militaristic subtext? Perhaps; this, however, sounded close to Shostakovich. An odd performance, discontinuities to the fore, was played as well as one would expect; it certainly had me think.

Salzburg Festival (1) - Goerne/Trifonov: Berg, Schumann, Wolf, Shostakovich, and Brahms, 11 August 2017

Haus für Mozart

Berg – Four Songs, op.2

Schumann – Dichterliebe, op.48

Wolf – Three Michelangelo Songs

Shostakovich – Suite on Verses of Michelangelo Buonarroti, op.145: ‘Dante’; ‘Death’; ‘Night’

Brahms – Four Serious Songs, op.121

Matthias Goerne (baritone)

Daniil Trifonov (piano)

This proved an outstanding recital, at least as much for Daniil Trifonov’s searching, protean pianism as for Matthias Goerne’s singing. Such a partnership, something beyond what one might ‘ordinarily’ expect during the concert season, is just what a festival such as Salzburg should be about. Likewise the programming: excellent in itself, yet also offering connections to broader themes on offer in the festival.

Goerne is singing Wozzeck here – on which, more later in the week – so Berg’s op.2 songs could, if one wished, be understood as anticipatory. More importantly, they made for a fine opening to this programme, the Hebbel setting ‘Schlafen, Schlafen, nichts als Schlafen’ drowsy, somnolent in the best way, emerging and yet never quite emerging from that state of half-awakedness. The languor one heard and felt had something of Debussy and early Schoenberg to it, yet could never quite be reduced to them or indeed to any other influence; this was Berg. Above all, it was founded in the piano part, above which words could then do their work. In its Parsfalian leisure-cum-torpor, one almost felt it to be ‘lit from behind’. ‘Schlafend trägt man mich’ continued in a recognisable line, yet initially lighter, soon more involved and questioning. Trifonov showed himself keenly aware of the importance of specific pitches and their repetition; later Berg beckoned already. ‘Nun ich der Riesen Stärksten überwand’ and ‘Warm die Lüfte’ continued the developmental idea, (re)uniting, intensifying earlier tendencies – and again the importance of specific pitch, here in the bells tolling and nightingale singing in the piano part.

Dichterliebe benefited from the alchemy of no clear break: Schumann’s song-cycle emerged from Berg’s songs and retrospectively announced that that was where they had always been heading. From the very outset, the opening ‘Im wunderschönen Monat Mai’, the limpidity of Trifonov’s piano playing was to die for, the delicacy of Goerne’s song also spot on. Magically slow, this was something to savour, without a hint of narcissism. ‘Aus meinen Tränen sprießen’ developed not only, it seemed from its predecessor, but from Berg’s songs too, not least in its nightingale song. Nothing here was formulaic, nothing taken as read: the voice took on the quality of something approaching an instrumental chamber music partner to the piano in ‘ich will meine Seele tauchen’, save of course for the words that both heightened and questioned that sense. The young Wotan seemed to appear on stage for ‘Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome’, his piano partner striking in dark, stark simplicity (however artful). The piano’s taunting cruelty in ‘Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen’ could match anything in Schubert: implacable, heartless, almost ‘objective’. It was, moreover, an unquestionably post-Schubertian agony here – distended, just a little, unerringly judged – that characterised the ensuing ‘Hör’ ich das Liedchen klingen’. ‘Am leuchten Sommermorgen’ brought that summer morning to refracted life courtesy of Trifonov, the piano part’s passing notes returning us to Berg, perhaps even going beyond him, whilst the piano chords in ‘Ich hab’ im Traum gewidmet’ spoke in almost Lisztian fashion, not unlike his Il penseroso. The strange tricks and consolations of dreams that followed (‘Allnächtlich im Traume’) seemed almost to prepare the way, following the weakened ebullience of ‘Aus alten Märchen’, for those two extraordinarily final postludes. They spoke at least as keenly as any words, even those of Heine.

Liszt, unsurprisingly, came more strongly and unquestionably to the fore in Wolf’s Drei Gedichte von Michelangelo. His harmonic language and its bitter self-destruction haunted ‘Wohl denk’ ich oft’. Quite rightly, words took the lead in ‘Alles endet, was entstehet’ and ‘Fühlt meine Seele’, seemingly inciting Wagnerian harmonies through what, in context, sounded most Schopenhauerian language. The two songs’ different character registered as strongly as what they held in common.

Trifonov’s quasi-verbal directness of utterance, especially in the bass register, struck me especially powerfully in the three Shostakovich Michelangelo songs that followed. It was as if the ability to ‘speak’ were being returned with interest. In ‘Dante’ in particular, Goerne brought to our attention Shostakovich the seer and the critic. That importance ascribed to particular pitches in Berg seemed to haunt the world of Shostakovich too, as if to remind us of what might have been. Once again, however incorrect this priority in the world of mere empiricism, the words of the following songs seemed to grow out of the piano’s wordless speech. ‘Night’ (Noč’) evinced an unfamiliar familiarity, musical and verbal. ‘Hush, my friend, why awaken me?’ Why indeed?

That illusory ‘timeliness’ – what could be more ‘timely’ – of Brahms in ‘archaic’ mode proved especially striking in the Vier ernste Gesänge. Trifonov’s understanding and communication of the piano parts was properly generative, even occasionally verging on a quasi-objective autonomy, an ontological frame within which the Biblical words might be intoned and considered. ‘Ich wandte mich und sahe an alle’ nevertheless spoke of subjectivity, of a late verbal Intermezzo that more than hinted at Webern. An earlier German Romanticism hung in the air, and yet clearly had passed: sad, perhaps, but Goerne’s Ecclesiastes Preacher would surely have understood. An almost Bachian embrace of death, albeit with a more Romantic sense of tragedy underlying it, characterised Goerne’s delivery in ‘O Tod, wie bitter bist du,’ flickering half-lights again very much from the world of the late piano pieces. ‘Wenn ich mit Menschen- und mit Engelszungen redete’ afforded a climax that was truly Pauline in its depth, complexity, and sheer difficulty. The best theologians will sometimes, as Brahms shows us, be agnostic, even atheist, albeit in a strenuous sense: more Nietzsche than, God help us, Richard Dawkins and his ilk. This was Brahms’s reckoning with how things were, just as much as that of the epistle writer. And so it was with the recital as a whole: a reckoning necessarily both final and not.

Prom 15 - Complete Prokofiev Piano Concertos, Trifonov/Babayan/Volodin/LSO/Gergiev, 28 July 2015

Royal Albert Hall

Piano Concertos nos 1-5

Daniil Trifonov, Sergei Babayan, Alexei Volodin (pianos)
London Symphony Orchestra
Valery Gergiev (conductor)

Yes, in case you had not heard about this much-hyped extravaganza, this concert offered all five of Prokofiev’s piano concertos. Much nonsense was spoken beforehand concerning the length of the concert. Excluding the two intervals – just the one would surely have been preferable – it barely lasted longer than the first act of Parsifal. However, as Richard Bratby remarked to me, overlap between concert attendance and opera attendance is less than one might expect. That is perhaps especially the case in this country, and is to the detriment of both camps. Germany, as ever, shows a far healthier cultural life; for one thing, many of its greatest orchestras play as a matter of course in both opera houses and concert halls. Although one could hardly award this programme marks for imagination – one might, I suppose, as Devil’s Advocate, on the basis that it can rarely, if ever, have been attempted before – I was certainly willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. After all, one can often learn a great deal by hearing a composer’s development, even if the ‘CD bargain box treatment’ – fine for a CD bargain box – is hardly something to be welcomed in principle for concert life.

 

 

Daniil Trifonov playing the First Piano Concerto
Images: BBC/Chris Christodoulou

 

The playing of the LSO was generally excellent, although I cannot believe it was the most eagerly awaited of the season’s engagements by the orchestra itself. Valery Gergiev is, to put it mildly, a controversial figure, both politically and musically, but he has generally been in his element in Prokofiev’s music, and so he was here too, even if there were a few cases of carelessness, which greater rehearsal or, perhaps, care on his part during rehearsal might have averted. And so, the First Piano Concerto opened and, indeed, continued with just the ‘right’ orchestral sound. That is not to say that there is only one, but the trick is to make one think, or at least feel, that there is. It was certainly a forthright opening, preparing to ‘do business’, as it were. (I shall try to avoid an undue number of comments on the conductor’s friendship with Vladimir Putin, but the reader should feel free to draw whatever conclusions he or she wishes.) Daniil Trifonov, for me by some way the most interesting of the evening’s three pianists – to be fair, he had the two greatest of the concertos at his disposal – presented perhaps the most motoric performance I have heard, at least to start with. That that was an interpretative strategy became clear when, later on, especially during the slower sections, he pulled around the score to great, fantastical effect, perhaps hinting at, whilst also keeping its distance from, Scriabin. Whatever he did convinced, and that was the crucial thing, and the degrees of dynamic variegation never ceased to amaze. The work’s Lisztian inheritance was clear, both virtuosically and structurally. So, perhaps more surprisingly, were the roots of much of Prokofiev’s later style – and by ‘later’, I mean some time after his final piano concerto, at least as far as Cinderella and its evocation of moonlight. There was some beautifully hushed orchestral playing, not least from the warm cushion of LSO strings, and the truly outstanding wind soloists made every line their own. (This was, I believe, the first engagement of the new principal oboist, Olivier Stankiewicz.) If Scriabin sometimes came to mind, so did Rachmaninov, especially in certain elements of the piano figuration. And yes, that was partly, I am sure, a matter of a very, if not exclusively, ‘Russian’ brand of piano virtuosity.

 

Sergei Babayan in the Second

 

The Second Piano Concerto is heard less often: partly, I suspect, on account of its extreme technical difficulties, but also surely testament to its unusual structure. Here, I did not find that remotely a problem. If it receives a good performance, which it did, then such a problem, if indeed problem it be, seems suspended during playing. Sergei Babayan and the orchestra again offered sound that seemed ‘right’, without that necessarily precluding alternatives. Acerbic Romanticism, almost a very Russian Brahms sound, emerged at times, more so at the keyboard. The music is more discursive, of course, and the performance seemed content, in my view quite rightly, not to curb that tendency unduly. I very much liked the Babousha-like playing in the first movement, akin to half-speed Sarcasms, heading toward the grotesquerie of The Love for Three Oranges. A keen rhythmic sense was crucially maintained throughout. After the huge cadenza, the LSO brass entry still managed to sound awe-inspiring, before the music subsided into nothingness. The second movement proved a surprisingly light-footed moto perpetuo: Mendelssohn for the age of the internal combustion engine. Its successor then seemed to hark back to the age of Mussorgsky’s ‘Bydlo’, brass and drums infallibly setting the scene for some more flat-footed (knowingly so) piano grotesquerie. Dances emerged from one another, slightly deformed. Contrast was thus to be discerned in the more balletic material of the fourth movement: on speed, as well as at speed? Also, alas, in one of the more extended of the evening’s passages for mobile telephone. The ‘side-stepping’ quality of Prokofiev’s melodies was clearly relished but, commendably, not exaggerated. Formal oddities, then, were neither camouflaged nor played up. This was, perhaps, surrealism avant la lettre, or avant L’Ange du feu.

The Third Piano Concerto, surely everyone’s candidate for the greatest, is the most Classically proportioned: three movements of more or less equal length. However, in this performance, it sounded considerably less Classical in spirit than it often does (for instance, in my favourite set of the concertos, from Michel Béroff, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and Kurt Masur). It was none the worse for that; Trifonov and Gergiev for the most part convinced on their own, often imaginative terms. The opening of the first movement was sinuous, with perhaps the most athletic piano entry I have heard here. It was probably the fastest tempo I have heard for the movement too, although that proved highly flexible; Classical, I should reiterate, this was not. The weight of chords where necessary offered a masterclass in modern piano touch. Again,in spirit we seemed close to the fantastical world of The Love for Three Oranges. The slow movement offered similar virtues, albeit with different (for the most part) character. Its lithe passages were lithe indeed (and threatening); its ruminative passages were ruminative indeed (and enchanting); and so on. Trifonov’s leaning into syncopations truly made them tell musically; they were no mere ‘effect’. The finale, however, I found a little puzzling, curiously deliberate. Again, the fantastical elements came off very well, as did the LSO’s moonlit Romanticism. I was left feeling that a little more coherence and depth might have been achieved. As piano playing, however, and as rather more than that, there was a great deal to admire.

Alexei Volodin joins the orchestra for the Fourth Piano Concerto

 

The left-hand Fourth Piano Concerto, surprisingly receiving its first Proms performance, proved, for me at least, something of a trial. I think that was more a matter of the ‘programming’ than the performance, although the LSO sometimes seemed a little tired by now. With the best will in the world, it is hardly the equal of what had gone before. Alexei Volodin’s despatch of the piano part, especially in the first movement, offered intriguing parallels with the motorism Trifonov had brought to the First Concerto. Voicing within his single hand – or rather, the single hand he was using – was impressive. Soon, however, and certainly by the second movement, it was difficult to avoid the impression that what we heard was mostly to be understood at surface level, and I think that is a reflection of the piece itself. It really is not clear here, or at least was not on this occasion, how ideas follow on, or indeed how movements follow on, the third movement seemingly appearing from nowhere. I know this is not Ravel, and is not trying to be, but even so… The blandness of the gestures and material here and in the finale’s reheating of the first movement did nothing to dispel notions of fatigue all around.

The Fifth also received its first outing at the Proms. I was unable on this occasion to renounce my long-held view that it and its predecessor are considerably weaker works than their predecessors. I suspect, though, that they could make more of an impact if more sensitively – it would hardly be difficult – programmed. Again, it was the first movement that emerged strongest, feeling somewhat haunted by Stravinsky, without ever sounding ‘like’ him. Neo-Classical tendencies threatened to invade without ever quite succeeding in doing so. There was no doubting Babayan’s technical command, although again, how the music fits together remained an open question (not, I think, his fault). The tick-tocking of the orchestra in the second movement was accomplished very well by the LSO; I find little else to say about the material. The following Toccata was certainly Allegro but, at least at its opening, might have been a little more con fuoco. That came soon enough, though, and I was won round by Babayan’s initial more-is-less strategy as the more modernistic Prokofiev briefly asserted himself. The different moods of the fourth movement were well characterised; there was more than a hint of the Soviet future to be heard. Again, quite how this all coheres remains questionable. The finale did little to dispel notions of re-heating, despite occasional hints of originality, such as the duet for two bassoons. And then, suddenly, it stopped; not, I am afraid to say, in the spirit of Wozzeck. Goodness knows what Furtwängler, who conducted the first performance, must have thought.

 

Soloists and conductor take a bow