Pianist Daniil Trifonov. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Music box, October 20th, 2025

An album signed by pianist Daniil Trifonov, featuring works by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, recorded for Deutsche Grammophon and released on October 3rd, 2025.

We will listen to an hour and a half of Tchaikovsky's piano music, a program combining both well-known and spectacular works with pieces that are rarely performed. It is a program that illuminates the intimate world of the Russian composer, within an atmosphere dominated by intimacy, the idea of family, childhood, and happiness.

The best-known work on this album is the suite from the ballet The Sleeping Beauty by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, in the piano adaptation made by Mikhail Pletnev in 1978. Pletnev was only 21 at the time, and that same year he won the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. In 2011, Daniil Trifonov won that very same competition.

Daniil Trifonov, the 34-year-old Russian pianist who lives in the United States and studied there at the Cleveland Institute, is undoubtedly one of the great pianists of our time. His brilliant career was marked, among other things, by winning the Gold Medal at the 2011 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. Back in 1958, at the very first edition of that same competition, the Gold Medal was awarded to American pianist Van Cliburn - since then, arecording has remained that Trifonovalso listened to, of a rarely approached work by Tchaikovsky: Original Theme and Variations, the final section of Op. 19. Now, decades later, Trifonov performs this Original Theme with Variations by Tchaikovsky with deep sensitivity, a true link across time.

Equally little known today is Tchaikovsky's Sonata, Op. posth. 80, a work composed during his final year as a student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. It was never published during the composer's lifetime, appearing only in 1900. This unjustly forgotten piece reveals freshness and inventiveness, in fact, themes from its third movement were later used by Tchaikovsky in his First Symphony. Technically demanding and emotionally intense, the work shines under Trifonov's interpretation, full of subtle elegiac nuances.

Since 2012, Daniil Trifonov has been an exclusive artist with Deutsche Grammophon. Over the past 13 years, he has released 15 albums under this prestigious label including recital, concerto, and chamber recordings many achieving international acclaim. Among them, his complete recording of Franz Liszt's Études, which earned him a Grammy Award in 2017, and his recordings of Rachmaninoff's concertos with the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

I wouldn't necessarily say that Russian Romantic music suits Daniil Trifonov best after all, his 2023 album dedicated to Bach's The Art of Fugue was Grammy-nominated, and I personally admired it greatly. However, I do believe that music with profound inner complexity resonates deeply with him. Somewhat unexpectedly, Tchaikovsky's Children's Album, Op. 39, also fits within this sphere. Written in 1878 and inspired by Robert Schumann's Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood), these 24 miniatures explore the world of family life in fact, delving into the intimate domestic sphere of 19th-century Russian aristocracy. Through Trifonov's delicate and nostalgic interpretation, this universe of childhood comes alive not merely as innocent joy, but as a bittersweet evocation of a lost paradise that will never return.