Biography (read more)
Daniil Olegovich Trifonov was born on 5 March 1991 in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, to a composer father and music-teacher mother, and began piano at age five. He studied at Moscow’s Gnessin School of Music under Tatiana Zelikman and, from 2009, with Sergei Babayan at the Cleveland Institute of Music. In 2010–2011 Trifonov swept a remarkable run of major competitions: third prize at the Chopin Competition, first prize at the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition, and first prize and grand prix at the Tchaikovsky Competition, where Martha Argerich, a jury member, gave him the maximum score and later praised him as having “everything and more.” He signed with Deutsche Grammophon in 2013, and his recording of Liszt’s complete Transcendental Études won the 2018 Grammy Award for Best Classical Instrumental Solo. He has served as artist-in-residence with the Berlin Philharmonic (2018–19) and the New York Philharmonic (2019–20) and continues an extensive international touring and recording career.
Trifonov emerged in the early 2010s as, in Alex Ross’s phrase, a “furor” pianist in the lineage of Horowitz and the young Argerich, combining ferocious virtuosity with an unusually probing, idiosyncratic musical intelligence across Bach, Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, and his own compositions. Critics have repeatedly noted the tension in his playing between raw technical extremity and introspective delicacy, a combination that has made him one of the most closely watched pianists of his generation. His Grammy-winning Liszt Transcendental Études album (2016) and complete-cycle performances of the Rachmaninoff piano concertos with the New York Philharmonic have been central to a broader revival of large-scale Romantic virtuoso repertoire in the concert hall.
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