From virtuosity to poetry: Daniil Trifonov at Caramoor

For his recital – part of the 80th anniversary season of the Caramoor Festival – Daniil Trifonov traced a path that veered from the familiar, seeking out overlooked corners of the repertoire. Yet what made the evening memorable was not merely the programme, but the metamorphoses that emerged in its unfolding: character pieces became narratives, and technical challenges, poetic gestures.

The recital’s architecture – bookended by Tchaikovsky’s music – offered a study in contrasts. It opened with the Piano Sonata in C sharp minor, a little-known early work conceived during his final year at the St Petersburg Conservatory and closed with Mikhail Pletnev’s virtuosic transcription of scenes from The Sleeping Beauty, one of Tchaikovsky’s most beloved ballets.

If the sonata betrayed its composer’s inexperience, Trifonov’s intensity gave it shape and purpose. The first movement’s bold proclamations and turbulent progressions had an improvisatory vitality. The Andante, shadowy and lyrical, seemed to drift from a Schumann reverie, its tenderness illuminated with finely shaded rubato and hushed introspection. The fleeting Scherzo was playful yet taut, leading directly into a finale that pulsed with urgent, perpetual motion. Rather than exaggerate the sonata’s youthful exuberance, Trifonov highlighted its structural ambition and emotional restlessness with finesse.

Pletnev’s Sleeping Beauty transcription is not a straightforward reduction, but a concert paraphrase in the grand Romantic tradition, drawing on Lisztian flair and pianistic spectacle. It condenses eleven scenes from the ballet into a richly inventive piano work, brimming with character and contrast. Trifonov approached it not as an imitation of orchestral color, but as a transformation, conjuring the music’s whimsy and occasional eeriness with restrained, painterly precision. Each vignette was etched with distinct identity: the feline mischief of Puss in Boots, the delicate menace of Little Red Riding Hood, the noble lyricism of the Adagio. He shaped the suite as a sequence of fleeting tableaux, with crisp articulation and sudden shifts of touch evoking the fantastical and the grotesque in equal measure. Trifonov folded technical brilliance into storytelling, culminating in a finale that sparkled with rhythmic vitality and a lingering sense of enchantment.

Just as Tchaikovsky’s sonata was published posthumously, so were the two Chopin waltzes that framed Trifonov’s selection – a set of six played without pause and shaped as a single expressive arc. Where the Tchaikovsky suite radiated theatrical colour and contrast, Chopin’s waltzes turned inward, offering shifting reflections of grace, melancholy and tenderness. The E major opened with luminous poise; those in F minor and A minor brought a darker hue, their expressive shading deepened by subtle rubato and restraint. The “Minute” Waltz in D flat shimmered with delicacy, never pressed for speed, and the closing E minor receded gently into shadow. Trifonov treated each miniature not as a self-contained display, but as a gesture within a larger lyrical continuity – finely contoured, quietly intense, more evocative of Mozart than of Romantic grandeur.

Too rarely heard in recital, Samuel Barber’s Piano Sonata in E flat minor marked the evening’s high point. Trifonov rendered it with both force and insight. He shaped the opening movement’s jagged motifs and dense harmonies with lucid force. The second, a volatile Scherzo in all but name, crackled with rhythmic tension. But it was the Adagio mesto that cast the deepest spell: with its long-breathed lines and elegiac restraint, it summoned recollections of Schumann in its harmonic wanderings and inward melancholy, and of Chopin in the refined shaping of melodic contour. Trifonov treated the final fugue not simply as a virtuosic showpiece, but as the sonata’s structural and expressive culmination.

Modest as ever, Daniil Trifonov offered another masterclass in how virtuosity is sublimated into poetry.