Daniil Trifonov

Daniil Trifonov rose to prominence as a leading piano virtuoso toward the close of the 2010s, while simultaneously pursuing a career as a composer. Born on March 5, 1991, in Nizhny Novgorod, then within the Soviet Union, he grew up in a household where his father composed music and his mother taught it. He began piano lessons at age five and advanced quickly; after his family relocated to Moscow in 2000, he entered the Gnessin School of Music and worked with Tatiana Zelikman. On her advice he transferred to the United States in 2009 to study piano with Sergey Babayan at the Cleveland Institute of Music, and he pursued composition training in both Moscow and Cleveland. In 2011 he issued two recordings in Poland, one for the Dux label and another for the Fryderyk Chopin Institute. Success in major contests soon followed, bringing first prizes that year at the Artur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition and the International Tchaikovsky Competition. The Tchaikovsky victory opened the door to a recording of the composer’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B flat minor, Op. 23, with the Mariinsky Orchestra conducted by Valery Gergiev, after which demand for his live performances and further discs surged. Although he could have accepted far more engagements, he deliberately restricted himself to eighty-five concerts in the twelve months following that win. His first appearance at Carnegie Hall took place in 2013, the same year he established residence in New York and signed an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon; a live document of the Carnegie program appeared on the label soon afterward. He has since performed solo recitals in such venues as Wigmore Hall in London, the Musikverein in Vienna, and the Salle Pleyel in Paris. His concerto engagements have encompassed the world’s foremost ensembles, among them the New York Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, and the Russian National Orchestra, earning consistently fervent critical acclaim. During the 2018-2019 season he served as artist-in-residence with the Berlin Philharmonic. As a composer he presented his own Piano Concerto for the first time in Cleveland in 2014. By 2020 he had issued a dozen albums on Deutsche Grammophon, concentrating on the late-Romantic and post-Romantic literature; his account of Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes received a Grammy Award in 2018. That same year he released the album Silver Age, devoted to music by Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Scriabin. Additional recordings followed in the ensuing decade, among them the 2023 collaboration Rachmaninoff for Two, which paired him once more with his former teacher Babayan.