Daniil Trifonov’s Prokofiev concerto tops a generous menu of big music in San Francisco

United States Muzik, Prokofiev, Stravinsky: Daniil Trifonov (piano), San Francisco Symphony / Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor). Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, 21.2.2025. (HS)

Xavier Muzik – Strange Beasts (San Francisco Symphony Commission and world premiere)
Prokofiev – Piano Concerto No.2
Stravinsky – The Rite of Spring

San Francisco Symphony served up a hearty concert Friday evening in Davies Symphony Hall. There was a lot to chew on: a world premiere, a gripping The Rite of Spring and, especially, soloist Daniil Trifonov harnessing Prokofiev’s ultra-challenging Piano Concerto No.2.

All three pieces were designed to make big impressions. The Concerto No.2 and Rite famously challenged listeners’ ears on first hearing, although Stravinsky’s ballet score now draws audiences rather than repelling them. Xavier Muzik’s Strange Beasts, a San Francisco commission, fit that mold too, its oversized orchestra thundering with gritty harmonies and an intent to reflect the composer’s anxiety.

Muzik was the 2023 winner of the Michael Morgan Prize from the Emerging Black Composers Project, a joint initiative of the San Francisco Symphony and San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The composer, who studied at Mannes School of Music in New York with Jessie Montgomery and Timo Andres, also dabbles in photography, and his pictures featuring towering buildings in Los Angeles were projected on a screen above the orchestra, coordinated with the rhythms of the music.

He wrote the piece while living in Los Angeles, where the big buildings downtown struck him as looming monsters. They triggered his own ‘anxieties and catastrophic thinking’, as he described it in an engaging pre-performance talk, which he found oddly comforting. I am not certain that the images (which rapidly flicked past) enhanced or distracted from the music itself, but the combination won over a full audience.

The 17-minute tone poem rumbles, bumps into itself, and occasionally soars with elation. He clearly has command of the instrumentation, which splashes a variety of colors and textures. The music rises and falls in waves. Softer sections sometimes feel like respites and, at other times, as simply eerie. Climaxes, of which there are many, can assault the ears with dissonance, but they always give way to some resolution. It ends on a wispy, evanescent clarinet lick.

More than a century old, the Prokofiev piano concerto and Rite premiered within months of each other in 1913. Both embraced a level of fierceness and unleashed dissonance that earned mixed reviews for Prokofiev and provoked a famous riot for Stravinsky’s raw, rhythmically jolting score in its first hearing in Paris. Prokofiev’s original score was destroyed in a fire after the 1917 revolution, but he reconstructed it and updated it from memory for its 1924 re-premiere, also (perhaps not coincidentally) in Paris.

Whatever the history, the concerto presents a formidable challenge to any soloist. Trifonov, all business at the keyboard, grasped the music and ran with it, delivering a masterful, energizing, dazzling whirlwind of a performance. Esa-Pekka Salonen harnessed the big orchestra in sync with Trifonov, seamlessly connecting the orchestra’s rhythms to the soloist. The brass and percussion interjections pushed the momentum briskly.

The outsized cadenza in the opening Andantino, which also serves as the development, surged with passion, all ringing chords decorated with clouds of crystal-like pianistic flourishes. The sarcastic Scherzo came through as a perpetual-motion zinger, and the Intermezzo countered with intentionally heavy-handed rhythms. Trifonov’s delivery of the Finale lived up to its marking, Allegro tempestoso, aggressive fortissimos and wistful lullabies. The ending was especially pungent as the piano tapered to a pianissimo before the orchestra crashed in with the final recapitulation.

The encores were, if anything, even more engaging. First, the second movement Allegro vivace e leggero from Barber’s Piano Sonata recalled the clouds of pianistic flourish from the Prokofiev concerto’s Intermezzo. Then came the snarky Gavotte from Prokofiev’s Cinderella ballet, in the composer’s own transcription for his ‘Three Pieces from Cinderella’. The point was also made that Barber’s harmonies and pianistic flourishes were often not so far from Prokofiev’s.

In The Rite of Spring, Salonen and the orchestra could not have been more alert to details, all the while revving up the intensity of expression. A bonus was the debut of the orchestra’s new principal bassoon, Joshua Elmore, whose résumé lists principal bassoonist of both the Fort Worth Symphony and the Chineke! Orchestra (an ensemble made up entirely of Black and minority ethnic musicians, based in London). He won’t officially fill the currently-empty position in San Francisco until late March, but the opportunity to slot him in for what certainly qualifies as the most famous bassoon solo ever qualifies as high-level serendipity.

Elmore’s lyric, polished, deftly phrased performance of the opening measures was a model of sonic beauty, and it set the tone for an exhilarating tour of the music. Salonen’s fluid gestures during the Introduction painted a sinuous pasture, and his energetic conducting of the offbeat rhythms of Harbingers of Spring focused entirely on the accented beats rather than the straight-ahead 2/4 in which the music is written. Clearly, he was after a more free-wheeling feel, even as he aimed for (and succeeded in) getting all the details right.

Balances within the orchestra were stunningly achieved, the most complex music layered so well that everything was audible. The most important voices emerged without strain. Softer, more relaxed moments allowed for much-needed breathing room, such as Spring Rounds and Mystic Circles of the Young Girls, yet still somehow pointing to the next propulsive section. Solo efforts, especially instruments less-often-featured such as alto flute (Blair Francis Paponiu), English horn (Russ de Luna) and E-flat clarinet (Matthew Griffith), painted a variety of needed colors.

As usual, timpanist Edward Stephan was at the center of the rhythmic excitement. The whole brass section, including a row of nine French horns (two doubling on Wagner tubas), brought their A-game.

Harvey Steiman