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Daniil Trifonov emerged as one of the major new stars of the piano in the late 2010s. He is also active as a composer.

Trifonov was born in Nizhny Novgorod, then part of the Soviet Union, on March 5, 1991. His father was a composer, and his mother was a music teacher. Trifonov took up the piano at five and made rapid progress. In 2000, his family moved to Moscow, and he enrolled at the Gnessin School of Music, studying piano with Tatiana Zelikman. At her recommendation, he moved to the U.S. in 2009 for piano studies with Sergey Babayan at the Cleveland Institute of Music. He also studied composition in both Moscow and Cleveland. In 2011, he released a pair of albums in Poland, one on the Dux label and one for the Fryderyk Chopin Institute. Trifonov began to rack up important competition wins, culminating in first prizes at the Artur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition and the International Tchaikovsky Composition in 2011. The latter led to the opportunity to record Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 in B flat minor, Op. 23, with the Mariinsky Orchestra under Valery Gergiev, and Trifonov was soon in high demand for both concerts and recordings.

He wisely limited his appearances in the year after the Tchaikovsky Competition win to 85, although he could have played many more. Making his debut at Carnegie Hall in 2013, Trifonov settled in New York. That year, he signed with the Deutsche Grammophon label, and an album version of his Carnegie Hall recital was released there that year. He has made recital appearances at major halls in many countries, including Wigmore Hall in London, the Musikverein in Vienna, and the Salle Pleyel in Paris. His concerto credits include appearances with most of the world's top orchestras, such as the New York Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, and the Russian National Orchestra; his concerts draw an unusual amount of enthusiastic critical praise.

For the 2018-2019 season, Trifonov served as artist-in-residence with the Berlin Philharmonic. He has also been active as a composer, premiering his own Piano Concerto in Cleveland in 2014. By 2020, he had released a dozen albums on Deutsche Grammophon. Focusing on core late Romantic and post-Romantic repertory, he earned a Grammy Award in 2018 for his recording of Liszt's Transcendental Etudes. In 2020, Trifonov released the album Silver Age, featuring works by Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Scriabin. Trifonov returned with several new albums in the 2020s, including Rachmaninoff for Two, on which he was joined by his teacher Babayan in 2023. ~ James Manheim

Sergey Rachmaninov was the last, great representative of the Russian Romantic tradition as a composer, but was also a widely and highly celebrated pianist of his time. His piano concertos, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, and his preludes famously test pianists' skills. His Symphony No. 2, the tone poem Isle of the Dead, and his Cello Sonata are also notable. The passionate melodies and rich harmonies of his music have been called the perfect accompaniment for love scenes, but in a greater sense they explore a range of emotions with intense and compelling expression.

Sergey Vasilyevich Rachmaninov, born in Semyonovo, Russia, on April 1, 1873, came from a music-loving, land-owning family; young Sergey's mother fostered the boy's innate talent by giving him his first piano lessons. After a decline in the family fortunes, the Rachmaninovs moved to St. Petersburg, where Sergey studied with Vladimir Delyansky at the Conservatory. As his star continued to rise, Sergey went to the Moscow Conservatory, where he received a sound musical training: piano lessons from the strict disciplinarian Nikolay Zverev and Alexander Siloti (Rachmaninov's cousin), counterpoint with Taneyev, and harmony with Arensky. During his time at the Conservatory, Rachmaninov boarded with Zverev, whose weekly musical Sundays provided the young musician the valuable opportunity to make important contacts and to hear a wide variety of music.

As Rachmaninov's conservatory studies continued, his burgeoning talent came into full flower; he received the personal encouragement of Tchaikovsky, and, a year after earning a degree in piano, took the Conservatory's gold medal in composition for his opera Aleko (1892). Early setbacks in his compositional career -- particularly, the dismal reception of his Symphony No. 1 (1895) -- led to an extended period of depression and self-doubt, which he overcame with the aid of hypnosis. With the resounding success of his Piano Concerto No. 2 (1900-1901), however, his lasting fame as a composer was assured. The first decade of the 20th century proved a productive and happy one for Rachmaninov, who during that time produced such masterpieces as the Symphony No. 2 (1907), the tone poem Isle of the Dead (1907), and the Piano Concerto No. 3 (1909). On May 12, 1902, the composer married his cousin, Natalya Satina.

By the end of the decade, Rachmaninov had embarked on his first American tour, which cemented his fame and popularity in the United States. He continued to make his home in Russia but left permanently following the Revolution in 1917; he thereafter lived in Switzerland and the United States between extensive European and American tours. While his tours included conducting engagements (he was twice offered, and twice refused, leadership of the Boston Symphony Orchestra), it was his astounding pianistic abilities which won him his greatest glory. Rachmaninov was possessed of a keyboard technique marked by precision, clarity, and a singular legato sense. Indeed, the pianist's hands became the stuff of legend. He had an enormous span -- he could, with his left hand, play the chord C-E flat-G-C-G -- and his playing had a characteristic power, which pianists have described as "cosmic" and "overwhelming." He is, for example, credited with the uncanny ability to discern, and articulate profound, mysterious movements in a musical composition which usually remain undetected by the superficial perception of rhythmic structures.

Fortunately for posterity, Rachmaninov recorded much of his own music, including the four piano concerti and what is perhaps his most beloved work, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (1934). He became an American citizen a few weeks before his death in Beverly Hills, CA, on March 28, 1943. ~ Michael Rodman, Patsy Morita

The career of pianist Sergei Babayan flowered after he moved to the U.S. in 1989. Since then, he has been a major presence on the American concert and educational scenes without neglecting his roots in Europe and the former Soviet Union.

Babayan was born in Gyumri, in Soviet-controlled Armenia, on January 1, 1961. His family was musical, and he began his studies at age six in Armenia, taking lessons there with Georgi Semerdjiev. At the Moscow Conservatory, his teachers were Mikhail Pletnev, Vera Gornostayeva, and Lev Naumov. Babayan took his first trip outside the Soviet Union in 1989, which produced a breakthrough in the form of a consecutive series of competition victories at the Cleveland International Piano Competition, the Hamamatsu International Piano Competition, and the Scottish International Piano Competition. These prizes brought him engagements in the West with the Cleveland Orchestra and the National Orchestra of Belgium. In 1995, Babayan made his debut recording on the Connoisseur Society label with an album featuring Gaspard de la Nuit and other Ravel works.

The following year, he founded the Sergey Babayan International Piano Academy at the Cleveland Institute of Music and has served as artist-in-residence there. Among his students have been Daniil Trifonov, Grace Fong, herself an important instructor, and Rubinstein Competition winner Ching-Yun Hu. Babayan took American citizenship and settled in New York. He has built a broad repertoire encompassing well over 60 concertos and other works by composers from Bach, Beethoven, Ligeti, and Lutosławski to Prokofiev, Pärt, Rameau, and Ryabov. His recitals are frequently heard at such world-class venues as the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, London's Wigmore Hall, and the Vienna Konzerthaus. Babayan's schedule in the late 2010s included performances with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Bamberg Symphony, and Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, among others.

Babayan has recorded for the Connoisseur Society, Pro Piano, and Mariinsky labels, and in 2018, he released the album Prokofiev for Two on Deutsche Grammophon with his frequent duo-piano partner Martha Argerich. He was signed to Decca and returned in 2020 with a recording of Rachmaninov's Preludes and Etudes-Tableaux; he has considered Rachmaninov central to his musical life since the age of 13. The Hamburger Abendblatt newspaper has likened Babayan to "one of those Japanese calligraphers who contemplate the white page before them in silence until, at the exact right moment, their brush makes its instinctive, perfect sweep across the paper." He returned in 2023 on Deutsche Grammophon, joining his student Trifonov on the album Rachmaninoff for Two, featuring the composer's duo piano works. By that time, his recording catalog comprised more than 20 releases. ~ James Manheim