Daniil Trifonov, Mariinsky Orchestra, Valery Gergiev - Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No. 1 (2012)

Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov is one of the contenders for the mantle of hot new Russian phenomenon, and he is gifted with the rare combination of incredible speed and a fairly natural manner in slower lyric material. Here he takes on the thankless task of creating something new out of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 in B flat minor, Op. 23, which he, like every other winner of the Tchaikovsky Competition going back to Van Cliburn, has been given the opportunity to record. He does fairly well in a sort of tense dialectic with conductor Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra, and he certainly has a lot of power in the concerto's big moments. Probably the best indicator of his future talents, however, are the solo piano pieces that round out the album. He catches the subtle inflections of Tchaikovsky's unaccountably neglected homage Un poco di Chopin, Op. 72/15, and delivers elegant if not especially striking performances of short pieces by Chopin himself and by Schumann. The highlight here is the set of Liszt arrangements of Schubert songs, which also are comparatively underplayed. With the swirls of pianism surrounding Schubert's melodies, these pieces are almost fresh compositions with the Schubert as a kind of cantus firmus rather than simply arrangements of variations. Trifonov carries them off with real flair, and they point to a bright future for this player. The album appears on the Mariinsky's own label, which bills it as an audiophile offering but actually leaves balance problems within the orchestra and between pianist and orchestra unsolved.