Kirill Petrenko and Daniil Trifonov

“There’s this special moment when you truly feel the music and we all become one connected whole”, as Daniil Trifonov says enthusiastically in an interview for the Digital Concert Hall. Here he performs Sergei Prokofiev’s youthful and exuberant Piano Concerto No. 1 with Kirill Petrenko. Also on the programme: a world premiere by the Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdóttir, plus Josef Suk’s tone poem A Summer’s Tale, which combines Bohemian flavouring with shimmering Impressionism.

Since the 2019/20 season, Kirill Petrenko has been chief conductor and artistic director of the Berliner Philharmoniker. He received his training first in Russia, then in Austria. The international music world first became aware of him when he premiered Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung at the Meiningen Theater in 2001, directed by Christine Mielitz and designed by Alfred Hrdlicka, performed on four consecutive days. He conducted the cycle for the second time twelve years later at the Bayreuth Festival. At the same time, Kirill Petrenko took up his post as general music director of Bayerische Staatsoper, his third leading position at an opera house after Meiningen and the Komische Oper Berlin. He also made guest appearances at the world’s top opera houses (from the Wiener Staatsoper, Covent Garden in London and the Opéra National in Paris to the Metropolitan Opera in New York) as well as with the great international symphony orchestras – in Vienna, Munich, Dresden, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Rome, Chicago, Cleveland and Israel. He made his debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker in 2006. Kirill Petrenko also appears with the Berliner Philharmoniker outside of Berlin – on tour and of course in the Digital Concert Hall. Selected performances are also available as recordings; most recently released was an edition with symphonic works by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Franz Schmidt and Rudi Stephan.

Alexander Scriabin’s Poème de l'extase provided the twelve-year-old Daniil Trifonov with a defining experience: he was so fascinated by the work’s powerful orchestral colours that he has been striving to achieve the same richness of sound on the piano ever since. In addition to his expressiveness and technical brilliance, it is this approach that has propelled Daniil Trifonov to the top of his profession. The fact that he himself also composes contributes to his understanding of the works he performs. Born to a family of musicians in Nizhny Novgorod in 1991, he studied with Tatiana Zelikman in Moscow and Sergei Babayan in Cleveland. In 2011, he won two prestigious competitions, the Arthur Rubinstein Competition in Tel Aviv and the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, and subsequently embarked on a spectacular international career. Daniil Trifonov’s debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker in 2016 marked the beginning of an intensive collaboration between pianist and orchestra which reached its first pinnacle with a residency by the artist in the 2018/19 season. The main focus of their work together so far has been on Romantic and late-Romantic piano concertos by Schumann, Scriabin and Rachmaninov. Last September Daniil Trifonov appeared for the first time with the Berliner Philharmoniker performing a piano concerto by Ludwig van Beethoven.