Adelaide Festival. Adelaide Town Hall. 14 Mar 2025
One of the last events in the 2025 Adelaide Festival featured two of the world’s best artists – pianist Daniil Trifonov and baritone Matthias Goerne. In the first half of the program Trifonov performed the complete Tchaikovsky’s Children’s Album, Op. 39 (from memory), and after the interval they both presented Schubert’s glorious song cycle Schwanengesang (Swan Songs). Trifonov was originally scheduled to perform Schubert’s Piano Sonata No.21, also composed in the last year of his short life, but this was substituted by the Tchaikovsky for unstated reasons.
Tchaikovsky’s Children’s Album, Op. 39, composed in 1878, is a collection of 24 short piano pieces inspired by Robert Schumann’s Album für die Jugend, Op. 68. Tchaikovsky intended the work to provide accessible yet artistically meaningful music for young pianists, unlike technical exercises. The pieces offer vivid character, storytelling, and emotional depth, making them engaging for both players and listeners.
Each piece depicts a distinct scene or mood. While not arranged in a strict key sequence as one might find in a set of preludes, the pieces progress with a diversity of tempo, character, and difficulty. They range from simple, folk-like melodies to more expressive and technically intricate compositions. Although written for young pianists, the suite presents challenges that require both technical control and musical sensitivity, with many of them demanding nuanced phrasing and dynamic contrast. Trifonov demonstrated his masterful technique with staccato mischievousness in The Hobby Horse and silky-smooth legato in Sweet Dream, crisp and steady rhythm in March of the Wooden Soldiers, and finely managed pedal control throughout. His performance of In Church was eerily but sublimely contemplative. Trifonov has remarkable forearm strength and is consequently very economical in his body physicality. Although the writing is comparatively unpretentious, it still requires the pianist to vividly tell stories, and Trifonov is clearly a storyteller of the first order.
When it was finished, the audience erupted in generous and sustained applause knowing they had witnessed a pianist at the very top of the game breathing life and purpose into a work that is infrequently presented on the professional concert stage.
Schubert’s Schwanengesang (Swan Songs) is a posthumous collection of songs published in 1829, the year after the composer’s death. Unlike his earlier cycles, Die schöne Müllerin (1823) and Winterreise (1827), Schwanengesang was not originally conceived as a unified song cycle. Instead, it consists of 14 songs set to texts by Ludwig Rellstab, Heinrich Heine, and (in some editions) Johann Gabriel Seidl. Despite this, the collection is often considered a cycle because of its cohesive emotional and musical themes, making it a profound final statement from Schubert. In that sense, the collection is very much Schubert’s ‘swan song’ in the colloquial meaning of the term, and the title Swan Song was coined by his publisher, not Schubert himself.
Unlike in Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, which comprise structured narrative cycles telling stories of love, rejection, heartbreak, alienation and despair, Schwanengesang is a thematic collection and lacks a single protagonist. However, its songs explore various facets of love and farewell. The Rellstab songs (e.g., Liebesbotschaft, Frühlingssehnsucht) evoke themes of nature, romantic yearning, and passion, often with an undercurrent of melancholy. They are lyrical and nature-focused, often portraying love through external imagery like flowing water and springtime breezes. In contrast, the Heine settings are psychologically intense, full of irony, despair, and supernatural elements (e.g., Der Doppelgänger involves ghostly self-confrontation), and they introduce a more tragic, haunted atmosphere, reflecting betrayal, memory, and death.
Schubert’s music enhances the emotions in each poem through harmonic shifts, melodic expression, and piano writing. The rippling arpeggios of Liebesbotschaft suggest a murmuring brook, while the dark, relentless chords in Der Doppelgänger create a chilling sense of dread. Die Stadt uses impressionistic, eerie piano textures to depict fog-covered waters. Trifonov perfectly navigated varied textures and moods, from the delicate arpeggios to stark, unaccompanied chords. He maintained Schubert’s long lyrical lines while all the time balancing the vocal melody. Goerne superbly handled the lyrical beauty and tremendous emotional depth of the songs, and his legato phrasing especially in Ständchen was honeyed. Goerne’s broad dynamic range is remarkable, with evenness across the very soft to the very loud. Like Trifonov, Goerne is a master storyteller, and it is easy to see why he has been so successful in opera.
Together, Trifonov and Goerne maintained a natural and unforced flow between songs all the time respecting the varying poetic and musical characters. They each fed off the other and ensured that Trifonov’s accompaniment supported Goerne’s compelling delivery and never overpowered.
A superb concert.
Kym Clayton
When: 14 Mar
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
