Daniil Trifonov

The Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov is “artiste étoile” at this year’s Summer Festival and performs three concerts. He 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 was subsequently 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 and Chicago Symphony Orchestras, and the Filarmonica della Scala. He has been artist-in-residence with the Berlin and New York Philharmonic Orchestras, the Vienna Musikverein, and New York’s Carnegie Hall. In the 2022-23 season, he completed concert tours with the Orchestre National de France and Cristian Măcelaru and with the London Philharmonic and Karina Canellakis; he additionally performed with the Czech Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic, Rotterdam Philharmonic, and Orchestre symphonique de Montréal. Trifonov is also dedicated to contemporary music: he premiered Mason Bates’s Piano Concerto, which was composed for him, with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin in 2022. As a composer, he introduced his own Piano Concerto in Cleveland in 2014 and a Piano Quintet in Verbier in 2018. He has released numerous CDs, including all of the Rachmaninoff piano concertos, which were released as a complete edition in the spring of 2023 to mark the composer’s 150th birthday. Trifonov was awarded 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 performing Scriabin’s Second Piano Sonata, Liszt’s B minor Sonata, and the Préludes of Chopin.

July 2023