Dubbed “without question the most astounding pianist of our age” by The Times of London, Russian-born pianist Daniil Trifonov is the type of musician that only comes along every 100 years.
Now 31, his consummate technique and expansive tonal range has garnered lavish praise—and some of music’s highest honors.
In 2018, Trifonov won a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Solo Album of 2018 for “Transcendental,” his collection of Liszt etudes. In 2019, he was named Music America’s Artist of the Year.
And, just last year, he was drafted into the “Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres”—France’s prestigious “Order of the Arts and Letters” club, which has counted Bono, David Bowie and Ringo Starr as members.
Born in 1991 in Nizhny Novgorod, western Russia, Trifonov studied under master pedagogue Tatiana Zelikman at Moscow’s Gnessin School of Music before heading abroad to the Cleveland Institute of Music to pursue his studies with Armenian-American pianist Sergei Babayan.
Trifonov has stunned audiences since his studies in Moscow, but it was between 2010 and 2011—when he took home three medals at the world’s most prestigious piano competitions—when he turned heads on a global scale.
(In just that season, the pianist-composer took third prize in Warsaw’s Chopin Competition, first prize in Tel Aviv’s Rubinstein Competition and both first prize and the Grand Prix in Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Competition.)
On Thursday, Aug. 4, Trifonov will return to the Sun Valley Pavilion to perform Johannes Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, widely regarded as one of the composer’s most emotionally direct and technical works.
The concerto—premiered in Hanover, Germany, around New Year’s in 1859—is thought by many to encapsulate some of the composer’s most turbulent years and serve as a record of not only friend and fellow composer Robert Schumann’s 1854 suicide attempt, but also Brahms’ romantic feelings for his friend’s wife, Clara Schumann.
Toeing the line between virtuosity and unbridled expression, grandiosity and humility, it starts with an explosive wall of sound built by timpani, followed by stormy string passages, an inexplicably delicate second theme and, again, a wild outburst.
The tender “Adagio” movement is more or less a portrait of Clara Schumann, Brahms’ lifelong—and, by several accounts, mutual—love interest, as well as an accomplished pianist and composer in her own right.
As Brahms wrote to a friend around the same time:
“I believe that I do not have more concern for and admiration for [Schumann] than I love her and find love in her. I often have to restrain myself forcibly from just quietly putting my arms around her and even— I don’t know, it seems to me so natural that she could not misunderstand.”
To experience the gargantuan work and once-in-a-lifetime artistry, grab a seat at the Sun Valley Pavilion in advance of the show’s 6:30 p.m. start. 
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