There is in ancient Roman mythology the ambiguous figure of a two-faced god. Janus, as he is called, is the deity of new beginnings, one head turned backward, the other forward. It would not be entirely inappropriate to conjure the image of this deity to approach the programme presented by the Rotterdam Philharmonic with Daniil Trifonov and Lahav Shani. Pairing works by Brahms and Schoenberg, the evening explored two distinct facets of Romanticism, with masterpieces that incorporate the inheritance of the past while pointing, nevertheless, to the future.
When Schoenberg's tone poem Verklärte Nacht was premiered in Vienna in 1902, it was met with hisses and brawls. The hostility had to do with the score, which purists considered harmonically irregular, but also with the poem behind it. Richard Dehmel's symbolist text follows two lovers on a moonlit walk, during which the woman confesses she carries another man's child; to her surprise, her companion forgives her and declares the child his own. All this controversy would never let one guess that Schoenberg's Op.4 was to become his most performed work, one he would later arrange for string orchestra, the 1917 version presented here.
Following each verse of the poem, Schoenberg organises his music not against a thread of actions but in chains of emotions, etched through a leitmotivic treatment that corresponds to each presence in the poem. The Rotterdam Philharmonic traced this web with absolute control: crystalline clarity in the opening, where the footsteps in the evening are atmospherically conjured by the cellos and violas, and equal conviction in the most densely contrapuntal passages. The modulation from E flat minor to D major, the work's great emotional turning point, had such cosmic force that even those unfamiliar with the poem would understand that some ineffable transformation had taken place.
Brahms’ two piano concertos share the same symphonic ambition, the Second going further by adding a Scherzo to the usual three-movement structure. Such are the dimensions of this work (and the dramatic weight of certain pages) that one can easily forget it is, at heart, a deeply poetic masterpiece. Not Daniil Trifonov. His response to the horn's opening call in the first movement was so delicate that it left no doubt his reading would be more lyrical than heroic. That is not to say the pianist failed to convey the drama of the first two movements, or to explore their climaxes with all the urgency they demand, but rather that he approached the work from a more intimate standpoint.
Trifonov’s technical command was never in doubt: fast runs were filled with boiling tension; long lines were treated with an almost Chopinesque attention; and the bold chords that pervade the work, even at the loudest dynamics, never lost a sense of direction. In the Scherzo, the fiendishly difficult octaves had contrapuntal clarity, with the ghostly middle voices whispering between the extremes. In the Andante, Trifonov carried the cello's warmly introduced line forward rather than taking the lead and his trills had an almost ethereal force. In the finale, played with agility and a light tenderness, each return of the main theme was given its own character by the conductor, while in the Hungarian-flavoured episodes Trifonov gracefully receded, letting Shani bring the orchestra to the fore, before both seized the closing pages with leonine force.
To the delight of an audience that could not clap any louder, Trifonov returned to the stage for an energetic encore, Golijov's Levante, bringing to a close what one might call, echoing Dehmel's poem, a “bright night”. A transfigured one, certainly.
