Daniil Trifonov and Matthias Goerne’s Schubert was sometimes shaky, sometimes searing
The duo performed Schubert’s G Major Piano Sonata and Schwanengesang
Photo courtesy of Robert Torres
Schubert’s Piano Sonata in G Major D.894, Schwanengesang D.957 (“Swan Songs”)
Daniil Trifonov, piano, and Matthias Goerne, baritone
Celebrity Series of Boston
NEC Jordan Hall
Oct. 24, 2025
On Friday, Oct. 24, world-renowned pianist Daniil Trifonov and baritone singer Matthias Goerne performed an all-Schubert concert in New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall.
Trifonov opened the evening with the G Major Piano Sonata. Composed in 1826, this piece was the last piano sonata published before Schubert’s untimely death two years later at the age of 31. Schubert straddled the boundary between the Classical and Romantic eras, working with his own expansive and innovative conception of classical form while exploring possibilities in harmony and melodic lyricism. The G Major Sonata is often singled out as an exemplar of Schubert’s output, the work of a composer with full control over the tools at his disposal and a clear, powerful vision of what his music should be. It is also serene, peaceful, and full of charm; dramatic, but never turbulent. Above all, it is a tall order for any pianist who wishes to perform it, given that it has many risks and potential pitfalls of interpretation and technique.
From the beginning, Trifonov’s structural pacing raised eyebrows. He played the opening chord with a healthy sound, ensuring the hall was filled with the sounds of G major. At first glance, it seemed to be an understandable method (after all, surely one wants to be heard?). As the movement progressed, however, this choice proved to have unfortunate consequences. The opening volume marked in the score is pianissimo; by setting the lower bound of his dynamics so high, Trifonov constrained his expressive range. Indeed, when the development section ought to have arrived with a fury, it barely seemed like a significant event had occurred, despite the performer’s visible agitation.
Furthermore, Trifonov’s playing conveyed a level of activity unnatural to the character of the piece. Melodic fragments were fussed over, each eighth note a different length than the next. The first time around, it was intriguing, lyrical, and indeed quite expressive. By the tenth, however, the novelty had worn off. On top of that was his treatment of the silence between phrases. He often launched headlong into the next phrase, creating a connection between them even when Schubert wrote none. The pacing felt as though it were composed of run-on sentences, at times leaving one gasping for air. Notably, Trifonov gave room to breathe in the last four bars of the exposition and the analogous section of the recapitulation. Upon his arrival at these points of stasis, the music miraculously opened up, resulting in a radiant, peaceful, and simple melody. Perhaps this was the point of his style: to elude any resolution until the periods at the end of Schubert’s paragraphs. It’s hard to say that such a conception was effective.
Trifonov’s idiosyncrasies lingered in the subsequent movements of the sonata. He stopped to smell all the roses in the lyrical second movement, pushing and pulling at the tempo to give the melodic line the spontaneity of a singer. Such a stunt may have been much more effective in a looser work designed for those opportunities, but in this case, it obscured the pulse and sense of structure. In the fiery B section, Trifonov’s impassioned ferocity caused him to lose the balance between the left and right hands, the bass growling beneath the melodic line. This happened again at the bold declamatory entrance to the third movement. However, after the muddy opening gave way to a playful minuet, Trifonov’s instinct to mess with the time signature revealed itself to actually bolster the music. He exploited all the nuances possible within the strict 3/4 meter. On the piano bench, he himself was dancing, fully in his element.
The final movement began with a lurch, like a spritely fairy having a little too much fun with its powers of flight. Repeated notes permeated the movement; Trifonov pounced on them every time, perhaps playfully, but also nervously. With his formidable virtuosity, Trifonov had no problem with the right hand’s notoriously difficult rapid ascending thirds. He dropped the off-kilter demeanor when the texture thickened in the B section of the rondo; with a constant stream of eighth notes interspersed by a steady pulse of quarters, the music truly took off for a fun ride passing through Schubert’s crazy modulations and dramatic contrasts in volume.
Unfortunately, this momentum dissipated once the return of the rondo A section brought back Trifonov’s queasy sway. Critics have long called out Schubert’s music for its repetitiveness, and part of the difficulty of performance lies in the challenge of maintaining the flow of ideas through repeated sections. Sadly, the next section of Trifonov’s performance seemed a little lost. The music forayed into distant keys and new themes, yet one could not shake off the feeling that he was just going through the motions to make it to the end. The A theme finally returned, seasick and giddy, for the third and final time. It concluded with glitter and sparkles falling back to a quiet reprise of the opening idea, a diminutive ending that was taken a little too seriously.
In his solo performance, Trifonov displayed his characteristic musical personality: his ear for delicacy and barbarity, his ability to hew diamonds from any moment in a piece, and his risky and thrilling virtuosity. Despite all of these admirable qualities on display, something crucial was still missing from the evening – Trifonov lacked restraint. A more judicious application of his expressive instincts and a more rigid adherence to tempo would have served him well, helping him illuminate the music’s interrelations and self-consistency.
Anticipation hung in the air before Schwanengesang (“Swan Songs”) began. Schubert discovered unplumbed depths of expression in his songs and established the genre of the “song cycle,” a collection of songs meant to be performed together with their narrative and thematic connection. Schwanengesang, his last song cycle, does not have a clear narrative, but is held together by a thematic throughline of longing.
In partnership with Goerne, Trifonov changed his presentation. Gone was the compressed figure, the furrowed brow, the contortioning torso. Instead, seated at the piano bench was now a bespectacled, upright man with a clear view of both his music and his singer, arms relaxed and ready. His transformed posture seemed to be reflected in his playing as he produced a more focused and deliberate interpretation.
Goerne, for his part, assumed the physicality his accompanist had previously, his body following wherever the vocal line led him. Beneath the balcony, no angle of the audience was beyond his gaze, nor even the floor. He turned and paced next to the piano, right arm tethering him to the instrument at all times. When he scanned across the room, the volume occasionally modulated between direct and indirect sound, but his projection ensured he could be heard.
Except when he could not. The violence in the second and eighth songs, Kriegers Ahnung and Der Atlas, clearly excited both players, who proved that when voice and piano compete for volume, piano always wins. Especially in Der Atlas, Trifonov committed fully to a blistering tremolo and a thundering bass, a mass of noise through which the audience could barely perceive, much less communicate with, Goerne.
The musicians seized upon many opportunities throughout the song cycle and brought them to their maximum intensity. In four songs, they succeeded in creating a potion of subdued anguish of heart-wrending potency. For all of the slow burners, In der Ferne, Ihr bild, Am Meer, Der Doppelganger (6. In a distant place; 9. A picture of her; 12. By the sea; 13. The doppelganger), the duo paced themselves perfectly, saturating the air with the weight of their restraint and pushing the tension to its breaking point. With the closing emotional catastrophes of Am Meer and Der Doppelganger, Trifonov and Goerne left their emotional mark on the audience through their combined artistic vision.