If you try to take away my Sviatoslav Richter recordings �" or my Marcelle Meyer platters, for that matter �" I will bite. But it's time for someone to say �" so let me �" that you don't need a Wayback Machine to investigate the Golden Age of Pianism. We're in one. As usual, there are far more exceptional pianists than can make careers today (Federico Colli, where have you gone?), but with a trio of pianists 30 or under �" in reverse age order, Igor Levit, Yuja Wang and Daniil Trifonov �" we now have three musicians who regularly play at the level of the greatest of their predecessors, when not above it, and who between them have the piano repertory covered.
Trifonov's latest stake to my claim is Transcendental, a two-CD set of the complete concert etudes of Franz Liszt (DG). As the pianist himself points out, the pieces are not etudes in the usual sense �" pieces accentuating or exploiting specific aspects of keyboard technique �" but in an only slightly later time would have been called "poems." Throughout the set, Trifonov's technical mastery is such that his playing calls attention away from itself, relentlessly, and into the atmospheres and sound worlds of the pieces that, for a welcome change, make the album title seem more than a marketing ploy. This is transcendent playing, gratefully recorded in such true sound that you can enter it.
What Trifonov shares with his elders in my trio is something approaching a mania for clarity, such that every note can be heard, albeit it in its proper place in the sound picture. That in itself was not always a goal of earlier pianists, but in the same, rather miraculous way that contest athletes keep surpassing their forebears, athleticism in piano-playing today will settle for nothing less than accuracy at its most pointillist. In Trifonov's case, the notes are so securely in his fingers that, unless you're actually watching him play, you quickly max out on how-did-he-do-that? fatigue and fall helplessly into the music's spell.
That said, ending the set with the Paganini Etudes ensures that the last thing you hear is the famous "Tema con variazioni" (ironically, the theme now better known in its variations by Rachmaninov), and the sheer welter of notes does intrude on the attention �" precisely as Liszt meant it to. But the earlier numbers in the group take you much farther into a realm where picture and sound, fantasy and illusion meld. With Trifonov's wizardry, the campanile bells in the almost overly familiar "La campanella" really do exist in their own, separate, distant, insistent space �" and rhythmic orb �" and their clanging resembles no other instrumental sound in more than two hours of playing that leaves nothing on the keyboard unexplored.
There's exuberance of the highest kind in Trifonov's playing, but, critically, not of the Lang Lang variety, that is, limited to whatever joy can be excised solely from the player's own delight in his virtuosity. Trifonov leaves the exhibitionism to Liszt. Even in the breakneck speeds of "Gnomenreigen" ("Dance of the Gnomes"), there's space for breath, and dance-like, not machine-like rhythms.
The pianist hears the pieces in sets and plays the episodes in long, uncommonly cogent paragraphs. The seldom-played "Il lamento," the first of the Three Concert Etudes, S 144, is expressed with a rhythmic, expressive freedom that lives in the music, not in the musician's manipulation of the notes. The long, lithe arcs of rippling sound in the set-ending "Un sospiro" trace a torrent of feeling that's likely to leave you wet someplace or other. I had projectile tears the first time I heard it.
This leaves the vast expanse of the 12 Transcendental Etudes, which Trifonov transverses "in a single bound." Some of the numbers do lead into their successors without a break, but the imaginative leap here is one only a musician with this pianist's fusion of divine child/wise old man archetypes in his soul could make. There's no sense anywhere that these are preliminary readings by an artist who is certain to grow in the pieces, though certainly he will. The only concession to youth in Trifonov's playing is that it doesn't stop to ask you whether you want to come along or stay behind. It seizes you slightly before you're ready and doesn't put you back down until long past the place where you don't think you can take it anymore. Commenting on details in the chapters of this spellbinding book would be antithetical to its spirit.
If perchance you're new to Trifonov, Christopher Nupen's films Daniil Trifonov: The Magics of Music, including a short recital from the Veneto (Allegro Music), makes a fine introduction. It's calculated to make you fall in love with the guy, but you would anyway. We are not just in good but the best hands.