We may be running out of things like fresh water and breathable air, but one thing we have plenty of is pianists �" so many brilliant young ones, in fact, that reputable critics have stopped ranking them. Among them is 24-year-old Daniil Trifonov, already no stranger to Davies Hall audiences, where he's torn up the place with Chopin on opening night, and last year, Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini . One of the recording events of the fall has been DG's release of his Paganini Rhapsody with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Yannick Nezet-Seguin, an all-Rachmaninov package including two other sets of the composer's solo-piano variations and Trifonov's own five-movement solo suite, Rachmaniana .
Trifonov's is a notably deep-into-the-keys prowl through a Rhapsody in which many another fine pianist has found something lighter and more mercurial. Many if not most of the connoisseurs of the Rachmaninov concertos, or the middle ones anyway, concede that it's the non-concerto Paganini Rhapsody they love most, so no one's going to mind if Trifonov does some properly Russian brooding over it.
What brings his into the company of the finest recordings of the work is that all-important ping in his tone, one that Trifonov pronounces with an accent all his own. It's integrated into his playing throughout �" every note is clear in the most heavily scored passages �" but what it gives his performance of the work as a whole is a cumulative sense that the alternately stentorian and shadowy variations are a path to the increasingly dizzy dance that is the work's destination.
In Trifonov's reading, the big, swooning Andante Cantabile 18th variation seems, not for once but for certain, in the right place. It's one of those big-hearted, big-boned Russian melodies that seem cloying only when "sung" with hesitation or apology. Trifonov plays it less as the work's climax than as the shimmering platform from which it prepares its final, upward leap.
It's a passage of unusual interest in this recording. The dynamic and openly gay Nezet-Seguin is clearly a kindred spirit in the enterprise, rightly giving his soloist the most reliable of musical support. The tight, bracing, full-orchestra chords at the outset foretell the keenness of the reading, the solo wind passages its warm heart. Yet there's an underlying squareness about it you feel most strongly when Trifonov breaks the leash you hardly knew was there to sing that ensnaring, truly rhapsodic melody with supreme freedom and tenderness. Listen closely to the moment when, in a reversal of Tchaikovsky's procedure in his First Piano Concerto, the massed strings recapitulate the tune: there's a detectable if fleeting sense of the pianist's getting back into harness.
You don't have to go deep into the vaults of recordings, which for me would start with Rubinstein, to find a Paganini Rhapsody more magical, more high-spirited, more insistant on playing in the starlight. In easy memory there's Yuja Wang's, with Abbado, in which everyone breathes like dancers, the deep, expansive breaths only perceptible when the music touches ground.
An intensity of a worryingly generic kind is the signature of Nezet-Seguin, beloved of audiences and airlines everywhere. There are times when it can substitute for finer gradations of feeling and avoid the undercurrents of darker or subtler emotions. There's serious talk of his succeeding James Levine as music director at the Met, and I'm among those cheering that move. He's that good. But even in his crackling, season-opening Verdi Otello, which I heard in broadcast three times, I missed the disturbing music churning under all that excitement.
You feel it again when Trifonov gets on with the remainder of his recital. He shrewdly telescopes a couple of the middle variations in the Variations on a Theme of Chopin, but the invention unleashed between the gravity of Chopin's C-minor Prelude, sounded as the two frames to Rachmaninov's homage, is prodigal and enthralling. The later Corelli Variations, which close the disc, boast even greater substance and variety. This is dazzling playing.
Trifonov's own Rachmaniana (of 1991) similarly feels like the young composer-pianist's homage to his forebear: true Rachmaniana, not Rachmaninov mania. It enters on an almost Scriabinesqe, dappled evanescence, then explores the whole instrument in the manner of the work's namesake, with a Debussy-ian feel for color. I find Trifonov's score not just similarly, but equally, enchanting as Rachmaninov, a piece I can imagine Yuja Wang performing in a manner all her own.
Nezet-Seguin has done most of his Bruckner and Mahler exploring on CD with the Orchestre Metropolitain of Montreal, his third orchestra. I've been along for the ride. ATMA Classique has just released their Mahler's 10th, the most fully satisfying of the series. There's still the metric squareness I find so inhibiting, but it's more understandable given a fine but not big-league orchestra. Because Mahler left it unfinished at his death, the 10th might be the most undervalued, misunderstood work in the repertoire, and it can't have too many champions.
Nezet-Seguin captures the individuality of each of the five movements, and if the expressive means in Montreal are more limited here, the emotional commitment is greater. It's trademark Nezet-Seguin that the tympani thwacks at the Finale are more forceful and disconcerting than usual, but they open up a movement that follows the composer into the achingly beautiful unknown. I suspect I would love this recording even more if it hadn't appeared simultaneously with a visionary live performance of the third Derek Cooke completion by the BBC Scottish Symphony under Donald Runnicles. Pillage the Internet for it. On commercial recording, Riccardo Chailly's with the RSO Berlin is still unsurpassed.