Daniil Trifonov, Piano

Event is Live

Carnegie Hall Presents

Thursday, March 3, 2022 8 PM Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage

This event has been rescheduled from November 17, 2021. Tickets for the original date will still be honored.

Daniil Trifonov by Dario Acosta

Daniil Trifonov’s spectacular 2013 recital debut introduced Carnegie Hall audiences to a deep-thinking musical intellectual who weds an insatiable sense of adventure to breathtaking virtuosity. He showcases his pianistic muscle, articulation, warmth, and wit in Prokofiev’s acerbic Sarcasms and Debussy’s mercurial Pour le piano. Stamina and expressivity—Trifonov hallmarks—are essential in the Szymanowski and Brahms sonatas that round out the program. Szymanowski’s single-movement work mesmerizes with harmonic daring, while Brahms’s youthful, symphonically scaled sonata soars with beautiful melodies.

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Performers

Daniil Trifonov, Piano

Program

SZYMANOWSKI Piano Sonata No. 3, Op. 36

DEBUSSY Pour le piano

PROKOFIEV Sarcasms

BRAHMS Piano Sonata No. 3 in F Minor, Op. 5

Event Duration

The printed program will last approximately two hours, including one 20-minute intermission.

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At a Glance

SZYMANOWSKI Piano Sonata No. 3, Op. 36

Szymanowski’s Third Sonata of 1917, a formidably virtuosic work poised on the cusp between tonality and atonality, testifies to the Polish composer’s stylistic adventurousness as well his prowess as a concert pianist. He dedicated the sonata to the great Russian pianist and conductor Alexander Siloti, whose plans to lead premieres of Szymanowski’s First Violin Concerto and Third Symphony in St. Petersburg were thwarted by the Russian Revolution.

DEBUSSY Pour le piano

In the three short pieces that this exquisite mini-suite comprises, Debussy paid homage to the 18th-century masters he professed to emulate. Although critics associated him with painters like Manet and Whistler, he maintained that his music depicted not superficial impressions but essential “realities.” Musicians alone, he declared, enjoyed “the privilege of being able to convey all the poetry of the night and the day,” whereas painters could “recapture only one of her aspects at a time.”

PROKOFIEV Sarcasms, Op. 17

Reviewers often used words like steely, volcanic, and tempestuous to describe Prokofiev’s piano playing, but he also showed a softer, more poetic side in both his performances and his compositions. This suite of miniature character pieces dates from his student years in St. Petersburg, and resembles his contemporaneous Second Piano Sonata in its extreme contrasts of style, mood, texture, and tonality.

BRAHMS Piano Sonata No. 3 in F Minor, Op. 5

Written when the composer was only 20, the third and last of Brahms’s solo piano sonatas is characterized by a compelling blend of muscular majesty and tender lyricism. Although Brahms was no match for Chopin in terms of keyboard technique, his performances of his early sonatas mesmerized Robert Schumann, who referred to them as “veiled symphonies.”

Bios

Daniil Trifonov

Grammy Award–winning pianist and Musical America’s 2019 Artist of the Year, Daniil Trifonov is a solo artist, champion of the concerto repertoire, chamber and vocal collaborator, and composer, whose performances—combining consummate technique with rare sensitivity and ...