Great Performers

Artist

Daniil Trifonov, piano

Program

I

Piotr Illich Chaikovski (1840-1893)

Album for the Youth, Op. 39 (1878)

Robert Schumann (1810-1856)

Fantasy in C major, Op. 17 (1838)

II

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Fantasy in C minor, K 475 (1785)

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

Gaspard de la nuit (1908)

Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915)

Piano Sonata No. 5 in F-sharp minor, Op. 53 (1907)

Fantasies

Daniil Trifonov, one of the great world revelations of the piano in the last decade, had to cancel his recital at the Festival last year. This year he finally makes his debut, but his approach has changed radically. He now approaches five great composers that he subtly chains together. He starts with Tchaikovsky’s Album for the Young, twenty-four miniatures accessible to students who follow Schumann’s path, who wrote similar works. He continues with Schumann and his Fantasy op. 17, one of the greatest keyboard creations of the entire 19th century, which Trifonov links to Mozart’s marvellous Fantasy in C minor, a work of tragic upheaval that seems to herald Romanticism. Then there is a leap to the 20th century, with two works created almost at the same time, the virtuoso triptych Gaspard de la nuit by Ravel, a true fantasy of the wildest imagination, and Scriabin’s Sonata No. 5, with its fascinating harmonies and its open ending.