Daniil Trifonov

The Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov, who was born in 1991 in Nizhny Novgorod, began his piano training at the age of five. He started studying with Tatiana Zelikman at Moscow’s Gnessin Music School in 2000 and in 2009 joined Sergei Babayan at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Trifonov won the Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition in Tel Aviv in 2011 and subsequently emerged as the victor at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Competition, where he took First Prize as well as the Grand Prix. Since then, Trifonov has been a regular guest with the world’s most acclaimed orchestras, including the London Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia and Cleveland Orchestras, the San Francisco Symphony, and the Filarmonica della Scala. He has been artist-in-residence with the Berlin and New York Philharmonic Orchestras and at the Vienna Musikverein and New York’s Carnegie Hall. In 2023, he was a central part of the Lucerne Summer Festival as “artiste étoile.” In the 2024-25 season, he will perform Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto with the Vienna Philharmonic and Brahms’s Second Concerto with the Berliner Philharmoniker and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; he will also play the Dvořák Concerto on tour with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra and embark on a European tour with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal in the Schumann Concerto. As a chamber musician, he can be heard with violinist Leonidas Kavakos in various American cities. Daniil Trifonov is a successful composer as well: he presented his Piano Concerto in Cleveland in 2014 and his Piano Quintet in Verbier in 2018. Among his numerous recordings are accounts of all of Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos and, most recently, of the composer’s music for two pianos, which he recorded with Sergei Babayan and released in 2024. Trifonov received the Royal Philharmonic Society Award in 2016 and the Karajan Music Prize in 2017; Musical America named him Artist of the Year in 2019.

Lucerne Festival debut on 21 November 2012 in a program of works by Scriabin, Liszt, and Chopin.

July 2024