Trifonov and Welser-Möst find magic by pairing Prokofiev and Brahms in Cleveland

United States Prokofiev, Brahms: Daniil Trifonov (piano), Cleveland Orchestra / Franz Welser-Möst (conductor). Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center, Cleveland, 9.10.2025. (MSJ)

Prokofiev – Symphony No.7 in C-sharp minor, Op.131
Brahms – Piano Concerto No.2 in B-flat major, Op.83

After fleeing Russia’s communist revolution in 1918, Sergei Prokofiev spent a decade and a half in the west, trying alternately to out-Stravinsky Stravinsky and to be the witty and sarcastic bad boy of classical music. Tiring of these roles and finding little career traction, he allowed himself to be wooed back to his home country and resettled there for good.

It was a disastrous mistake. While Prokofiev was able at first to write some of his greatest pieces, the poisoned atmosphere of government overreaching became palling. After his dark Sixth Symphony, Prokofiev was one of a number of composers, including Shostakovich, brought up before the bureaucratic Composers Commission on charges of ‘formalism’, decadence and not writing positive music for the people. Each of the composers in that room stood quietly, drowning in the humiliation. All but one, that is. Only Prokofiev had the nerve to turn his back to the commission and loudly denounce their criticisms of him and his colleagues.

It was a brave move, and it cost him, of course: commissions and honors proved scarce after this. But even more dire, the stress crumpled Prokofiev’s health. He was working on a large opera project, War and Peace, but no one would touch it. One of the only commissions that came through was a modest request a few years later for an orchestral work to be performed for children. If the commissioners were expecting another Peter and the Wolf, they certainly didn’t get it. About all the defiance Prokofiev had left in him was the decision to make the new work a symphony – one of those forms denounced in the term ‘formalism’. Beyond that, it is a charming look back at childhood with melancholy adult eyes.

Franz Welser-Möst captured those layers in his performance with the Cleveland Orchestra, the third weekend of his twenty-fourth season with the ensemble. He has made a study in recent years of the symphonies of Prokofiev, and the composer’s music clicks well with him. Prokofiev’s poise and restraint clearly appeal to Welser-Möst, and he unfolds the pieces without resorting to extremes. The Symphony No.7, in particular, has no clear volume-driven point of climax, but it most certainly has an emotional one. The first movement shows the adult melancholy most clearly, while the three subsequent movements depict youthful playfulness viewed at a subdued distance. There are two important happenings near the end of the work, though, and Welser-Möst nailed them both.

The first is a non-event. Prokofiev ended the piece quietly, but the powers-that-be strongly suggested he revise it to provide an upbeat ending. Defeated, Prokofiev acquiesced, and added an ineffective, unconvincing coda. It is clear that Prokofiev wanted the original ending, and he tacked on the coda so loosely that conductors with common sense could detach the annoying and false coda. Alas, conductors are not always thinking creatures, and the revised ending is still commonly used today. Fortunately, Welser-Möst would have none of that, and stopped the piece where it was meant to end.

Secondly, there most certainly is a moment of emotional crisis near the end. Conductors who can’t grasp the superfluousness of the added coda also tend to gloss over the two chords in the brass that send the finale into its final wind-down, plucked strings slowing like the ticks of a clock running out of energy, like Prokofiev himself. Welser-Möst focused on those chords in a subtle way, neither playing them loudly nor exaggeratedly warping the tempo. But there was nonetheless an intensity to the two sustained chords that quietly broke the back of the nervously upbeat music, letting it subside into its gracefully quiet but stricken end. The orchestra was in marvelous voice, and this was a fitting culmination of Welser-Möst’s Prokofiev cycle in Cleveland.

But does a late Prokofiev symphony match well with Brahms’s grandest concerto? Surprisingly, yes. This concert’s concept came full circle in the finale of Brahms’s Piano Concerto No.2, which at times was playful and wistful in a way that resonated with the memory of the Prokofiev. And the partnership here between the conductor and soloist Daniil Trifonov assured that the Brahms would not be treated as a noisy spectacle. Yes, Brahms intentionally takes up the mantle of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto in the first movement, but Trifonov shaped the movement’s cascades as if Brahms were saying to us, ‘See? I can do the heaven-storming thing like Beethoven but watch where I alone can take this’. Each time, the pianist turned the magnificent volleys of notes into signposts leading to more thoughtful territory. His tone was burnished and rich, with an astonishing accuracy in Brahms’s thorniest thickets of notes.

In the initially stormy second movement, Trifonov and Welser-Möst got past the gestures to focus on the mysterious passages at the heart of the movement, which led into the breathtaking lyricism of the following slow movement. That movement was led by a gorgeous cello solo from principal Mark Kosower, twining autumnal glow with narrative shape. The music never just sat there indulgently: though ripe with luxurious warmth, it was always going somewhere, Trifonov wrapping it in a transcendent sheen. I heard the great Maurizio Pollini do this concerto in Cleveland with Christoph von Dohnányi twenty-five years ago. That performance was impressive, but it was nowhere near as transcendent nor anywhere as technically accurate as this one. Trifonov is one of the great players at work today, and it was clear why he is so highly regarded.

Trifonov brought the concert full circle by playing the twentieth of Prokofiev’s Visions fugitives as an encore, the music dissolving into elusive magic. Outstanding.

Mark Sebastian Jordan

Featured Image: Franz Welser-Möst conducts Prokofiev © Human Artist Photography/Yevhen Gulenko/TCO