Second nature

I will go out on a limb and say that only one pianist – ever – has given equally accomplished performances of Rachmaninov, late Bach and Stockhausen. The pianist I’m talking about is Daniil Trifonov, and two summers ago, in July 2019, he was sitting opposite me in a hotel lobby in Verbier.

Back then, Trifonov was in the foothills of learning Bach’s culminating fugal masterpiece, The Art of Fugue. His intention was to begin performing it the following summer: ‘I like to have a year of little by little getting to know a piece. I like to work on it, then leave it, and maybe come back to it in a month.’ But we all know what happened next.

At the time, all he would say was that his approach to both the cycle and the associated recital tour was at an embryonic stage. The intervening months and years have gestated a remarkable album, ‘The Art of Life’, which sets the cycle in the context of music by Bach’s prodigally gifted – and of course rigorously trained – family, notably