Daniil Trifonov

Grammy Award winning Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov – winner of Gramophone’s 2016 Artist of the Year award – has made a spectacular ascent of the classical music world as a solo artist, champion of the concerto repertoire, chamber and vocal collaborator, and composer. Combining consummate technique with rare sensitivity and depth, his performances are a perpetual source of awe.

Trifonov recently added a first Grammy Award to his already considerable string of honors, winning Best Instrumental Solo Album of 2018 with Transcendental, a double album of Liszt’s works that marks his third title as an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist. As The Times of London notes, he is “without question the most astounding pianist of our age.”

Trifonov launches the New York Philharmonic’s 2018-19 season, playing Ravel’s jazz-inflected Concerto in G for the opening-night gala under incoming Music Director Jaap van Zweden before rejoining the orchestra the following night for Beethoven’s mighty “Emperor” Concerto. He revisits the Ravel, both on tour with the London Symphony and Sir Simon Rattle, and during a residency at Vienna’s Musikverein that also sees him give the Austrian premiere of his own Piano Concerto. Similarly, the “Emperor” is the vehicle for further collaborations with the London Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas, the National Symphony and Gianandrea Noseda, the Cincinnati Symphony and Louis Langrée, and the Cleveland Orchestra and Franz Welser-Möst, with whom the pianist embarks on a tour of Asia.

Born in Nizhny Novgorod in 1991, Trifonov began his musical training at the age of five, and went on to attend Moscow’s Gnessin School of Music as a student of Tatiana Zelikman, before pursuing his piano studies with Sergei Babayan at the Cleveland Institute of Music. He has also studied composition, and continues to write for piano, chamber ensemble, and orchestra. When he premiered his own Piano Concerto in 2013, the Cleveland Plain Dealer marveled: “Even having seen it, one cannot quite believe it. Such is the artistry of pianist-composer Daniil Trifonov.”