The Philadelphia Orchestra presents a solo recital by pianist Daniil Trifonov

Tchaikovsky bookended the program, with the composer’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in C-Sharp Minor opening the evening. The composer crafted the piece while still a student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, and it bears the mark of a musical mind still in development—heavy on flash, light on depth. The same could be said for Trifonov’s interpretation. He easily summoned the crashing chords of the opening movement (marked Allegro con fuoco), but he seemed less confident projecting the vast leaps among the dynamic range that Tchaikovsky embedded in the piece. He found an introspective, poetic style for the Andante, but precision rather than humor defined his performance of the Scherzo, and he failed to tame the clamorous cacophony of the finale.

Elegance, wit, and grace

By contrast, Trifonov married elegance with wit in the Concert Suite from The Sleeping Beauty, arranged for piano by Mikhail Pletnev. It takes great skill to distill all the variations of color and sound an orchestra can provide through a single instrument. Trifonov managed this easily, from the muscular Prologue onward. He masterfully conveyed the fairy tale elements of the story—the fluttering Silver Fairy, the sly Puss in Boots, and the slippery pas des deux of Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf—without seeming cloying. The rhythmically insistent Finale concluded the evening on an excitedly jaunty note.

Trifonov turned to more familiar corners of the piano literature between the two Russian works. A series of six Chopin waltzes demonstrated the virtuosity and variability the composer brought to this familiar form. The Waltz in E Major (Op.Posth.) can sound juvenile in the wrong hands, but Trifonov found beauty in its simplicity. He located the melancholy embedded in the Waltz in F Minor (Op. 70, No. 2) and the bright jollity of the two major-key waltzes. The so-called “Minute Waltz” (Waltz in D-Flat Major, Op. 64, No. 1) sprung forth whimsically, without kitsch. The final offering of the set, Waltz in E Minor (Op.Posth.), ended on a lithe and graceful note.

Brilliance and discomfort

Samuel Barber’s Piano Sonata in E-Flat Minor sounds nothing like the rest of the composer’s mature output. The swelling neo-Romanticism and chromatic writing found in his Violin Sonata, Andante for Strings, or the opera Vanessa are hardly in evidence here. Despite some traditional harmonic elements, an insistent dissonance is more often evidenced, coupled with a jazzlike style reminiscent of Ravel. It’s a hard piece to love, and although Trifonov performed it vigorously, it still remained at arm’s length—at least for this listener. The Fuga: Allegro con spirito finale was overwhelming and occasionally terrifying, and I was glad when it was over.

Despite his brilliance at the keyboard, Trifonov remains an awkward stage presence—a fact magnified without the backing of an orchestra. He bounds out of the wings and heads straight for the keyboard, acknowledging the audience with only the most perfunctory of bows. Sometimes he doesn’t wait for his applause to subside before launching into a piece. When announcing his first encore, Tchaikovsky’s Sweet Dreams, he spoke so softly that most of the audience probably struggled to make out the title. There are surely few active pianists who play as brilliantly as Trifonov and who seem as uncomfortable doing so. But he seemed to fully relax for his final encore, a spacious account of the theme and first variation from Federico Mompou’s Variations on a Theme of Chopin.