May 30 & June 1, 2024
Atlanta Symphony Hall, Woodruff Arts Center
Atlanta, Georgia – USA
Carlos Miguel Prieto, conductor; Daniil Trifonov, piano.
Johannes BRAHMS: Piano Concerto No. 2 in B♭ major, Op. 83
Robert SCHUMANN: Symphony No. 2 in C major, Op. 61
Christopher Hill | 31 MAY 2024
The slim, silver-haired but youthful-appearing guest conductor of this week’s Atlanta Symphony Orchestra concerts, Carlos Miguel Prieto, is substituting on short notice for Maestra Nathalie Stutzmann, the orchestra’s music director. Who is this man who can conduct both large pieces without a score and with such gusto? He is currently the music director of the North Carolina Symphony in Raleigh. For a long time, he was music director of Mexico’s Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional. He frequently guest conducts European and American orchestras; now Atlanta knows why. Mr. Prieto has also, for 22 years, along with Gustav Dudamel, been a conductor of the Orchestra of the Americas.
As interest in Classical music has trended toward 0.01% of the population, today’s social remnants of 19th-century culture have produced an almost embarrassing richness of great piano virtuosos springing from many nations. On any given night, any one of these virtuosos might be the greatest pianist in the world—for that night. It’s safe to say that Daniil Trifonov has many nights when he is the virtuoso in that position. Part of the reason is that he simply loves playing music, whether as a soloist or as an accompanist. Another part is that he is managing his career as an intelligent adult. American audiences are fortunate that he plays regularly on our continent, something some other of the greatest pianists rarely or never do. Celebrated first for his pitch-perfect Chopin and spectacular traversal of the Russian concerto repertoire (e.g., Tchaikovsky, Glazunov, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Prokofiev), only recently has Mr. Trifonov begun moving into the German repertoire (Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms), music that requires a somewhat different pianistic approach if it is to be played without a “Russian accent.”
In point of fact, your reviewer believes that Mr. Trifonov has upped his game with this Brahms Second Piano Concerto, second to none among Austrian and German piano concertos. Brahms may have felt he had, in this concerto, pushed his technical capabilities as far as he could, for he dedicated it to his old piano teacher, the composer Eduard Marxsen. In Mr. Trifonov’s hands, it sounds supremely virtuosic. His was a magisterial account, one that, without imposing a foreign conception onto Brahms, unquestionably invited listeners to hear the concerto as they have never heard it before.
First, Mr. Trifonov insisted on making Brahms’ left-hand music as prominent as his right-hand music. The degree of precise calculation with which he implemented this viewpoint was ever-present yet never imposingly so.
What makes this approach particularly appropriate for Brahms can be seen in the composer’s chief criticism of New Music composers like Liszt, namely that their bass lines are often tonally undisciplined. Whether or not Brahms’ criticism is specious, it indicates how he himself listened to music and, especially, how he wrote his own music. Trifonov brought out Brahms’ bass lines and sonorities not only throughout the first movement, but also the second.
Pianist Daniil Trifonov performs Johannes Brahms’ “Piano Concerto No. 2” with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, led by guest conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto, May 30, 2024. (credit: Rand Lines)
That second movement is called a scherzo. Between the early 1840s and 1869 British-born, Continental-based Henry Litolff wrote five Concertos symphoniques, works that added a scherzo to the concerto’s usual three movements. The best remembered of these concerted scherzos, from the 1852 fourth Concerto symphonique, has a delicious Mendelssohnian lightness still admired in the 1870s and 80s (echoed in, for example, the middle movement of MacDowell’s 1885 Piano Concerto No. 2).
Brahms, by 1881 the creator of two magisterial symphonies, clearly relished the idea of creating his own version of a symphonic concerto. In so doing, he gave its scherzo a character that sounds the very opposite of Mendelssohnian lightness; the movement possesses, in fact, a passionate turbulence equal to anything in Brahms’ dramatic Piano Concerto No. 1.
Mr. Trifonov’s rich and balanced bass sonorities brought out all the titanic qualities of the music. As for the right hand, in quieter passages some of the descending runs were pearly; in louder passages they came like flashes of heat lightening. Which brings us to the second thing Mr. Trifonov insisted on: namely that Brahms’ phrases should have bite, that they should normally end with energy. No autumnal moping about was heard in this performance.
The drama of the concerto’s first two movements is balanced by the inwardness of its third movement, “Andante,” and the playfulness of its fourth, “Allegretto grazioso.” In the “Andante,” Mr. Trifonov played with uncannily rapt attention and inward delicacy, which are, for this listener, chief among the pianist’s rare qualities. Music-making this deep defies labels and descriptions. It’s enough to say that it captures immensities, be they of tenderness and delicacy or of power and passion.
The final movement was remarkably different from any other interpretation your reviewer knows. ‘Different’ can sound arbitrary; here it sounded not merely judicious but significant and insightful. Imagine Brahms as lithe, as a dancer; Mr. Trifonov made it sound believable, and at the end of the movement, the audience gave him a heartfelt ovation for his troubles. In return, Mr. Trifonov gave the audience an encore of two blistering movements from Prokofiev’s Sarcasms, Op. 17.
Schumann’s most personal symphonic work, the Symphony in C major, Op. 61, is also his most ambitious. He drafted it in short, or piano, score during December 1845, just a week after finishing an intensive, eight-month-long study of Bach that produced, among other things, the Opus 60 fugues for organ. The results of Schumann’s study are immediately apparent in the first movement’s introduction, and they continue to be heard throughout the symphony’s outer movements. Yet the study of Bach’s counterpoint also refined Schumann’s ear for harmony, so its results also affect the arguably less contrapuntal inner movements (though the slow movement includes a fugato).
Schumann orchestrated the symphony between February and October 1846, an uncommonly long period for a man who tended to work quickly. These months saw the composer beset by physical and mental torments, but they also gave him time to mull over how to use instruments to good advantage in what was, in his own mind, a new manner of composition.
Carlos Miguel Prieto leads the atlanta symphony Orchestra in Robert Schumann’s “Symphony No. 2,” May 30, 2024. (credit: Rand Lines)
The interpretive challenge of the Symphony is to convincingly capture Schumann’s vision of triumph over adversity, a version more psychologically nuanced than that found in some of Beethoven’s best-known middle-period works (e.g., the Fifth Symphony). The argument and nobility of Schumann’s first movement lies in its tension between inner stillness and the extroverted energy required to undertake the challenges of bustling, sometimes disheartening, daily life. Under Mr. Prieto, the ASO found unity and purpose in the movement’s contrasting moods and melodic transformations. Thanks in part to the excellent acoustics of the hall, contrapuntal inner voices could be heard with exceptional clarity.
The interpretive challenge of the second movement is to find a meaningful connection between the fleet lightness of its initial perpetual motion and the contrasting moods of its two trios—a variation on the first movement’s expressive dichotomy. Mr. Prieto took the first trio at virtually the same quicksilver speed as the opening section; this might have proven foolhardy with some ensembles, but the ASO strings and (especially) winds proved themselves more than equal to the task. The second trio was taken at a somewhat slower tempo, with silky strings creating suave and nuanced dynamics.
The challenge of the third movement is to show how its affecting melodic and harmonic material conveys more than sentimental rhetoric. Approaching death, Bernstein made this movement nearly 14 minutes long. Mr. Prieto traversed it in nine and a half minutes. Others have traversed it in as little as seven and a half minutes, but the majority of performances your reviewer knows take it at around ten and a half. It simply is more affecting at that slightly slower tempo (as played, for example, by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchester under Kubelik, as well as by Barenboim, Thielemann, Sawallisch, and many more). That said, Mr. Prieto’s interpretation was always nuanced, and his tempo seemed perfect for the central fugato, which was played with an elegant simplicity second to none your reviewer has heard.
The challenge of the final movement is perhaps the greatest of all. Schumann gives us a formally unique movement, Janus faced, one that begins by looking backward and ends by looking forward. By 1845, Schumann had written quite a few effective (and formally more conventional) last movements, so this unusual concoction was no accident. What was Schumann trying to show through music? Suffice it to say that the hymn of thanksgiving, which dominates the latter half of the movement, is a close cousin to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” The ASO under Mr. Prieto made this movement a triumph, and a storm of applause and approving shouts burst out even before the final chord had ended. In toto, this was one of the best Schumann Seconds your reviewer has heard, and ASO management would not be amiss in inviting Mr. Prieto back as guest conductor sometime soon. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- Atlanta Symphony Orchestra: aso.org
- Carlos Miguel Prieto: carlosmiguelprieto.com/en
- Daniil Trifonov: daniiltrifonov.com
Read more by Christopher Hill.
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