Grammy Award-winning pianist Daniil Trifonov (dan-EEL TREE-fon-ov) has made a spectacular rise in the world of classical music - as a solo artist, as a master of the concerto repertoire, as a chamber music partner and song accompanist and as a composer. His performances, in which he combines consummate technique with rare sensitivity and depth, constantly evoke admiration. "He has everything and more, ... tenderness and also the demonic element. I've never heard anything like it," enthused pianist Martha Argerich. Daniil Trifonov won the Grammy Award for the best instrumental solo album of 2018 with "Transcendental", a Liszt collection that was his third album as an exclusive artist of Deutsche Grammophon. He was named "Artist of the Year" by Gramophone Magazine in 2016 and Musical America in 2019 and was named "Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres" by the French government in 2021. As the Times of London writes, he is "without question the most astonishing pianist of our time."
In the 2023/24 season, Daniil Trifonov will fulfil important engagements on three continents. He will perform Brahms' First Piano Concerto with the Cleveland Orchestra and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra; Brahms' Second Piano Concerto with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Atlanta Symphony and the Israel Philharmonic; Schumann's Piano Concerto with the New York Philharmonic; Mozart's "Jeunehomme" Concerto at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center and other American concert halls with the Rotterdam Philharmonic. He performs Chopin's First Piano Concerto with the Orchestre de Paris, Mason Bates' concerto, a work composed for the pianist during the pandemic, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, as well as the concertos by Gershwin and Rachmaninov with the Philadelphia Orchestra, with whom he performs in his home country and on a European tour. On a high-profile European tour with cellist Gautier Capuçon, he will play sonatas by Prokofiev and Debussy, and will also tour with a new solo programme by Rameau, Mozart, Mendelssohn and Beethoven, which will take him to musical centres such as Vienna, Munich, Barcelona, Madrid, Venice, Milan, Boston, San Francisco, Dallas and New York.
In autumn 2022, Daniil Trifonov took centre stage at the two season-opening galas of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington and Carnegie Hall in New York, where his opening concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra marked the first of his four appearances there in the 2022/23 season. Later in the season, he returned to Carnegie Hall with the National Symphony Orchestra, with Joshua Bell and with a programme of Mozart, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Ravel and Scriabin as the final stop on an extensive tour of North America. Other highlights of the 2022/23 season included concerts with the New York Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, artistic residencies with the Rotterdam Philharmonic and Radio France, tours with the Orchestre National de France and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra London, a chamber music collaboration with Stefan Jackiw and Alisa Weilerstein at New York's 92nd Street Y cultural centre and the release of the new deluxe CD and Blu-ray edition of the successful and Grammy-nominated double album "Bach: The Art of Life" on DG.
Daniil Trifonov was Artist in Residence with the New York Philharmonic in the 2019/20 season and performed the New York premiere of his own piano quintet. Other recent highlights include the "Perspectives" series at Carnegie Hall, the world premiere of Mason Bates' Piano Concerto with ensembles such as the Philadelphia Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, who co-commissioned the work, the performance of Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto under Riccardo Muti in the historic gala finale of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's 125th anniversary celebrations and the opening of the New York Philharmonic's 2018/19 season; entire cycles of Rachmaninov concertos at the New York Philharmonic's Rachmaninov Festival and with the London Philharmonia Orchestra and the Munich Philharmonic, residencies with the Berlin Philharmonic and at the Vienna Musikverein, where he performed with the Vienna Philharmonic and gave the Austrian premiere of his own piano concerto, as well as the famous New Year's Eve concert with the Berlin Philharmonic under Sir Simon Rattle.
Since his debut as a soloist at Carnegie Hall, London's Wigmore Hall, the Vienna Musikverein, Japan's Suntory Hall and the Salle Pleyel in Paris in 2012/13, Daniil Trifonov has performed solo concerts at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., among others, in the Boston Celebrity Series, in London's Barbican, Royal Festival and Queen Elizabeth Halls, in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw (Master Piano Series); also at the Berlin Philharmonie, the Herkulessaal in Munich, Schloss Elmau in Bavaria, the Tonhalle Zurich, the Lucerne Piano Festival, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, the Théâtre des Champs Élysées and the Auditorium du Louvre in Paris, the Palau de la Música in Barcelona, Opera City Tokyo, the Seoul Arts Center and the Melbourne Recital Centre.
In October 2021, Deutsche Grammophon released "Bach: The Art of Life" with Bach's masterpiece "The Art of Fugue", in a version completed by Daniil Trifonov himself. The album also contains excerpts from the notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach, music by four of the composer's sons and two pieces that are known to have been among the Bach family's favourites. "Bach: The Art of Life" earned the pianist his sixth Grammy nomination, while the accompanying music video, in which he plays his own completion of the last Contrapunctus of the "Art of Fugue", was honoured with the Opus Klassik Public Award 2022. Daniil Trifonov also received the Opus Klassik 2021 as Instrumentalist of the Year/Piano for "Silver Age", his album of Russian piano music with and without orchestral accompaniment by Scriabin, Prokofiev and Stravinsky. The album was released in autumn 2020 and followed the 2019 album "Destination Rachmaninov: Arrival", for which the pianist received a Grammy nomination in 2021. "Arrival", which includes the composer's First and Third Piano Concertos, is the third volume in the DG series recorded by Daniil Trifonov with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, following "Destination Rachmaninov: Departure", which was named Concerto Recording of the Year 2019 by BBC Music Magazine, and "Rachmaninov: Variations", which was nominated for a Grammy in 2015. DG also released the album "Chopin Evocations", which combines works by Chopin with pieces by the 20th century composers he influenced, as well as "Trifonov: The Carnegie Recital", the pianist's first recording as an exclusive DG artist, which captured his sold-out debut at Carnegie Hall in 2013.
In the 2010/11 season, Daniil Trifonov received awards at three of the most prestigious competitions in the music world: third prize at the Chopin Competition in Warsaw, first prize at the Rubinstein Competition in Tel Aviv and both first prize and the Grand Prix - an additional award for the best participant in a category - at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. In 2013, he was awarded the prestigious Franco Abbiati Prize for the best instrumental soloist by the leading Italian music critics.
Born in Nizhny Novgorod in 1991, Daniil Trifonov began his musical education at the age of five and then attended Moscow's Gnessin Music School as a pupil of Tatiana Zelikman before continuing his piano studies with Sergei Babayan at the Cleveland Institute of Music. He also studied composition and writes works for piano, chamber ensemble and orchestra. When he premiered his own piano concerto, the Cleveland Plain Dealer marvelled: "Even when you've seen it, you can't quite believe it. This is the artistry of the pianist and composer Daniil Trifonov".