I spent a fascinating hour yesterday afternoon interviewing Daniil Trifonov - it's a cover feature for PIANIST magazine and will be out in a few months' time. Backstage at the Barbican before his concert with the LSO, I had, in close up, the same impression that occurred when listening to him at the Southbank a little over a year ago: there's something in this 23-year-old Russian that seems lit from within. He talks about (among other things) total focus, composing - he is about to premiere his own half-hour piano concerto in Cleveland - and cause and effect, quasi-storytelling, in music. Watch this space for an alert to the feature as soon as it's out.
But all this, nonetheless, still wasn't half as astonishing as what he told us through Chopin's Second Piano Concerto in the concert. He makes it imperative that you listen to every note: each becomes as essential a part of the whole as every word is in, for instance, a Chekhov play. When phrases are repeated - e.g., that wonderful bouncy mazurka-like episode in the last movement - he never plays them the same way twice. The spiderweb delicacy of the second movement arabesques stopped the heart with their beauty, but there's power aplenty when he needs it - one senses no limits to this range - and his tone is an Aladdin's cave of glowing, kaleidoscopic colour. He sounds like nobody else; yet leaves you wondering why not everyone else plays like this. At the end the lady next to me turned round and remarked, "Maybe there really is a God."
He'll give his first Royal Festival Hall recital on 30 September and the programme will feature Bach - exactly which Bach he hasn't yet decided - followed by Beethoven's Sonata Op.111 and the small matter of the 12 Liszt Transcendental Etudes in the second half. Book here.
In the meantime, here is a fascinating interview with him that pitched up on Youtube - it's from Zsolt Bognár's series Living the Classical Life. Stand by for...why it's a good idea to practise underwater.
