The New York Philharmonic is devoting the last half of November to the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943), and the star chosen for this special festival is Daniil Trifonov, the 24-year-old, mop-headed Russian pianist-composer who sprang to international recognition in 2011, when he won both the gold medal at the Tchaikovsky Competition, in Moscow, and first prize at the Rubinstein Competition, in Tel Aviv. Since then, he has been a guest artist with most of the leading orchestras in America and Europe; the Deutsche Grammophon recording of his 2014 Carnegie Hall recital was nominated for a Grammy; and his virtuosic technique has been compared routinely with that of Vladimir Horowitz and Franz Liszt.
Between November 11 and 28, Trifonov will give multiple performances of Rachmaninoff’s second, third, and fourth piano concertos as well as his “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini for Piano and Orchestra.” (He played the first piano concerto last year with the Philharmonic.) He will also present a program of chamber music by the composer with members of the orchestra at the 92nd Street Y. The day before the festival began, at the WQXR Greene Space in Hudson Square, Trifonov played Rachmaninoff’s “Suite No. 2 for Two Pianos” with Sergei Babayan, his teacher at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where Trifonov has spent the last seven years earning his undergraduate and graduate degrees. Trifonov concluded that program with a composition of his own called “Rachmaniana.” In the past year he has performed all four Rachmaninoff concertos in London, and he is now in the process of recording them for Deutsche Grammophon with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra, following their release, in August, of Rachmaninov Variations.
Trifonov talked informally with me at the Gramercy Tavern the day before his first concert with the Philharmonic. He started performing professionally when he was 8, and at 17 he left Moscow, at the suggestion of his teacher there, to study with Babayan in Cleveland. Up to then he had never played the music of Rachmaninoff, but Babayan considered him perfect for it. Rachmaninoff left Russia after the 1917 revolution, and he lived for many years in the United States, where he developed a close friendship with Horowitz. The composer was also a virtuoso pianist, and his recordings from as early as 1924 are still available. Trifonov described Rachmaninoff’s keyboard artistry as being extremely focused on finding the dramatic center of a piece. Trifonov’s technical mastery of such difficult composers as Liszt, for example, is well known. He explained that playing Rachmaninoff requires a certain emotional preparation from deep inside. Liszt is about the hands and fingers, he said. But for Rachmanifoff he has to feel the energy come all the way from the spine, through the shoulders. “I can almost compare it to swimming,” he said.
How about stage fright? Questioned on the subject at WQXR, Babayon said that every performer has it before every performance: the fear of forgetting, of going blank. I asked Trifonov if he ever uses scores in performance. “Only with chamber music,” he said.
Does he ever relax? “I like hiking, wherever I am,” he said. He also apparently likes movies. He said that he and his girlfriend, who is also a pianist, were going that evening—the evening before his first performance—to see Spectre.
