RLPO/Petrenko – breathtaking agility of dazzling Daniil Trifonov

Though it has never achieved anything approaching the popularity of its two predecessors, Rachmaninov’s Fourth Piano Concerto has never lacked great interpreters, from the composer himself onwards. As his performance with Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic showed so vividly, Daniil Trifonov is the latest to join a list that includes Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli and Vladimir Ashkenazy.

Trifonov is perhaps the most dazzling pianistic talent around today, yet never flaunts that brilliance. As almost all pianists do nowadays, he played Rachmaninov’s final 1941 version of the Fourth Concerto, and one could almost take for granted the utter security of everything in the solo part, which twisted, darted and glittered with breathtaking agility. But he’s an intelligent artist, too, who lets the music speak for itself when it needs to, so that the opening of the concerto’s slow movement was all the more effective for being so beautifully matter of fact, without extra emotional loading.

Throughout the concerto, Petrenko was content to leave the musical spotlight to his very special soloist. But the orchestral accompaniment became a bit too neutral at times, and the rest of the concert, though played with total assurance and crispness by the RLPO, was just as uninvolving. Music by another expatriate Russian, Stravinsky’s 1938 ballet Jeu de Cartes, came before the Rachmaninov, with plenty of snap to its rhythms and graceful woodwind tracery, but no real sense of a dramatic trajectory or anything to portray the music’s theatrical origins. The programme closed with a symphony by a repatriated Russian, Prokofiev’s Fifth. This was equally plausible, though the emotional heft that underpins it was never suggested.

Trifonov’s performance was the thing to take away from the concert, not the Stravinsky or Prokofiev.

• Repeated at Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool, on 2 (7.30pm) and 3 February (2.30pm). Box office: 0151-709 3789.