Friday night’s Sydney Symphony treat at the Opera House’s Concert Hall was a sold-out affair. The audience sizzled with expectation at the prospect of hearing a ‘world celebrity’. Daniil Trifonov was in town ‘performing Rachmaninov’, as the informative program’s cover proclaimed. But which Rachmaninov? Well, it was Trifonov’s favourite among Rachmaninov’s four concertos: the Fourth.

In keeping with our election fever, the pre-concert talk by Natalie Shea established, by a straw poll, that members of the audience had any acquaintance with the Fourth. (Later this week, Melbourne audiences will hear Trifonov playing the much better-known Third.) Trifonov’s breathtaking pianism, in league with the unostentatious yet precise conducting of Asher Fisch, led to a most effective showcasing of the SSO’s many sectional and soloistic virtues, across a curiously complementary series of three works. The concert, then, appeared to hold all the ingredients for a blockbuster success.

Anatoly Lyadov’s The Enchanted Lake, a six-minute orchestral morsel salvaged from his unfinished opera Zoriushka, was deliciously shimmering, magical water-nymph music. Under Fisch, its atmospherics never risked coalescing into a full-blooded tune. That is, it was an ideal, wispy scene-setter – little more than a procedural upbeat – to the following piano concerto.

Historically, Rachmaninov’s Fourth never quite hit its stride. Indeed, despite the composer having made at least three revisions, the last a couple of years before his death in 1943, as well as a ‘definitive’ recording with Eugene Ormándy and The Philadelphia Orchestra (1941), its posthumous reception still hangs uncertainly. Yet many players appreciate its role as a more intimate, even confessional piece, as well as being one of the few serious works from the composer’s pen during his last quarter century, in America. There, he earned his living more as an itinerant pianist than as the composer-conductor of his earlier Russian-based decades. In a 2015 interview, Trifonov explained that the Fourth is his favourite, being the ‘most original’ and a ‘very novel’ concerto, where Rachmaninov ‘really tried to go out of his comfort zone’. ‘There is always some magic!’ he stated.

While this concerto has its Hollywood-like big tunes and Rachmaninov’s signature climaxes, around which the work’s tensions lie in plateaux, Trifonov, in the interview, drew attention to its more restless searching ‘with a lot of changing characters, of scenes and very mysterious nature’. For the audience, and I suspect many orchestral players, this mysterious inner plot can accentuate the more fragmentary, episodic, even abrupt nature of the ageing Rachmaninov’s writing.

And so it was on Friday night. Despite excellent soloist achievements from the woodwind and a suitably luscious ensemble from the strings, all finely dovetailing with Trifonov to produce a chamber music-like intimacy, the Fourth Concerto’s greatest limitations were seen in its oft-reworked finale. Those blazing couple of minutes, even with its jazzy punctuations, cannot overcome the jumble of sequencing and passagework that preceded it. The burghers of Sydney received this work enthusiastically for the musicianship projected from the platform, but not with the standing ovation or acclaim you might have expected. I think they sensed that this work not so much loses its way, among its highly changeable textures, as fails to demonstrate the taut sense of structural purpose evident elsewhere in Rachmaninov’s oeuvre.

The most successful performance came after interval: a youthful Hector Berlioz’s iconoclastic Symphonie fantastique, masterfully interpreted by Fisher. Over its five movements, this 1830 composition rewrote the purpose of music, showing not just how it could rival the visual arts or literature in demonstrating Romantic purpose, but that it also foreshadowed music’s emerging role as the ultimate Romantic art. And this, when Wagner was still a teenager!

The task for SSO’s more expanded orchestra – with nearly sixty strings and thirty others – was to follow Berlioz’s highly explicit program, starting with a movement of vestigial classical intent of form, and moving through vivid representations of a ball (second movement) and a gruesome march (to the scaffold, fourth movement) to reach the work’s finale, its apogee: a dream of a witches’ sabbath – all neatly packaged up by the recurring theme of his Beloved, ever present but ever different through changed disguises and instrumental representations.

The symphony’s longest movement, the third, is the hardest to pull off, as the work pivots irrevocably in service of this new romantic ethos. Its innocent scenes from the countryside, bookended by glorious cor anglais and oboe dialogue – eventually monologues – become caught up in stormy forebodings, with the thunder’s role calling for four timpani players. The movement’s fluctuating sense of momentum was brilliantly negotiated by Fisch. This allowed the remaining two, more crazily Romantic movements to spiral away, leading to the overlaying of Berlioz’s themes, including bells and dies irae workouts, which helped to make the work’s final minutes truly fantastic, and for the work to gain the greatest applause of the evening. I am sure that many who attended this concert, drawn by their love of Rachmaninov and its brilliant soloist, went away wondering how Berlioz’s mad symphony, now presented so vividly by Australia’s finest orchestra, had escaped their ken in recent times.

Such orchestras as the Sydney Symphony do not emerge from nowhere. This concert began with a heartfelt tribute, read by lead double-bassist, Kees Boersma, to recently departed SSO concertmaster, Donald Hazelwood, who led the orchestra for more than three decades from 1965. The orchestra’s strengths, as heard last Friday, bear musical testimony to Hazelwood’s decades of dedication.

Daniil Trifonov Performs Rachmaninov (Sydney Symphony Orchestra) was presented in the Concert Hall, Sydney Opera house on 28-29 March 2025. Performance attended: March 28.

Daniil Trifonov performs Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra at Hamer Hall on 3 April 2025 (7.30 pm) and Saturday 5 April 2025 at (2 pm).