GRAMMY Award winner Fabio Luisi launched his tenure as Louise W. & Edmund J. Kahn Music Director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra (DSO) at the start of the 2020-21 season. In January 2021, the DSO and Luisi announced an extension of the music director’s contract through the 2028-29 season. A maestro of major international standing, the Italian conductor is also set to embark on his sixth season as principal conductor of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, and in September 2022 he assumed the role of principal conductor of the NHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo. He previously served for six seasons as principal conductor of the Metropolitan Opera and nine seasons as general music director of the Zurich Opera.

In September 2022, Luisi and the Dallas Symphony released their first recording project together. Brahms’s First and Second Symphonies is available through the DSO’s in-house DSO Live label. 

The conductor received his first GRAMMY Award in March 2013 for his leadership of the last two operas of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, when Deutsche Grammophon’s DVD release of the full cycle, recorded live at the Met, was named Best Opera Recording of 2012. In February 2015, the Philharmonia Zurich launched its Philharmonia Records label with three Luisi recordings: Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, a double album surveying Wagner’s Preludes and Interludes, and a DVD of Verdi’s Rigoletto. Subsequent releases have included a survey of Rachmaninov’s Four Piano Concertos and Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with soloist Lise de la Salle, and a rare recording of the original version of Bruckner’s monumental Symphony No. 8. Luisi’s extensive discography also includes rare Verdi operas (Jérusalem, Alzira and Aroldo), Salieri’s La locandiera, Bellini’s I puritani and I Capuleti e i Montecchi with Anna Netrebko and Elīna Garanča for Deutsche Grammophon, and the symphonic repertoire of Honegger, Respighi and Liszt. He has recorded all the symphonies and the oratorio Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln by neglected Austrian composer Franz Schmidt, several works by Richard Strauss for Sony Classical, and an award – winning account of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony with the Staatskapelle Dresden.

Born in Genoa in 1959, Luisi began piano studies at the age of four and received his diploma from the Conservatorio Niccolò Paganini in 1978. He later studied conducting with Milan Horvat at the University for Music and Performing Arts in Graz. Named both Cavaliere della Repubblica Italiana and Commendatore della Stella d’Italia for his role in promoting Italian culture abroad, in 2014 he was awarded the Grifo d’Oro, the highest honor given by the city of Genoa, for his contributions to the city’s cultural legacy. Off the podium, Luisi is an accomplished composer whose Saint Bonaventure Mass received its world premiere at St. Bonaventure University, followed by its New York City premiere in the MetLiveArts series, with the Buffalo Philharmonic and Chorus. As reported by the New York Times, CBS Sunday Morning and elsewhere, he is also a passionate maker of perfumes, which he produces in a one-person operation, flparfums.com. 

GRAMMY Award-winning pianist Daniil Trifonov (dan-EEL TREE-fon-ov) has made a spectacular ascent of the classical music world, as a solo artist, champion of the concerto repertoire, chamber and vocal collaborator, and composer. Combining consummate technique with rare sensitivity and depth, his performances are a perpetual source of awe.

“He has everything and more, … tenderness and also the demonic element. I never heard anything like that,” marveled pianist Martha Argerich. With Transcendental, the Liszt collection that marked his third title as an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist, Trifonov won the GRAMMY Award for Best Instrumental Solo Album of 2018. Named Gramophone’s 2016 Artist of the Year and Musical America’s 2019 Artist of the Year, he was made a “Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres” by the French government in 2021. As The Times of London notes, he is “without question the most astounding pianist of our age.”

Trifonov undertakes major engagements on three continents in the 2023-24 season. In concert, he performs Brahms’s First Piano Concerto with the Cleveland Orchestra and Toronto Symphony; Brahms’s Second with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Atlanta Symphony and Israel Philharmonic; Schumann’s Concerto with the New York Philharmonic; Mozart’s “Jeunehomme” at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center and other U.S. venues with the Rotterdam Philharmonic; Chopin’s First Piano Concerto with the Orchestre de Paris; Mason Bates’s Concerto, a work composed for the pianist during the pandemic, with the Chicago Symphony, Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, and Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin; and both Gershwin and Rachmaninov concertos with The Philadelphia Orchestra, which he joins at home and on a European tour. In recital, he plays sonatas by Prokofiev and Debussy on a high-profile European tour with cellist Gautier Capuçon, and tours a new solo program of Rameau, Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Beethoven to such musical hotspots as Vienna, Munich, Barcelona, Madrid, Venice, Milan, Boston, San Francisco, Dallas, and New York, at Carnegie Hall.

In fall 2022, Trifonov headlined the season-opening galas of Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra and New York’s Carnegie Hall, where his Opening Night concert with The Philadelphia Orchestra marked the first of his four appearances at the venue in 2022-23. Over the course of the season, he returned to Carnegie Hall with the National Symphony Orchestra, with Joshua Bell, and as the final stop of an extensive North American recital tour with a program of Mozart, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Ravel, and Scriabin. Other 2022-23 highlights included concerts with the New York Philharmonic and Chicago Symphony; season-long artistic residencies with the Rotterdam Philharmonic and Radio France; tours with the Orchestre National de France and London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; a chamber collaboration with Stefan Jackiw and Alisa Weilerstein at New York’s 92nd Street Y; and the release of DG’s deluxe new CD & Blu-Ray edition of the best-selling, GRAMMY-nominated double album Bach: The Art of Life.

Trifonov undertook a multi-faceted, season-long tenure as 2019-20 artist-in-residence of the New York Philharmonic, featuring the New York premiere of his own Piano Quintet. Other recent highlights include a season-long Carnegie Hall “Perspectives” series; the world premiere performances of Bates’s Piano Concerto with ensembles including the co-commissioning The Philadelphia Orchestra and San Francisco Symphony; playing Tchaikovsky’s First under Riccardo Muti in the historic gala finale of the Chicago Symphony’s 125th-anniversary celebrations; launching the New York Philharmonic’s 2018-19 season; headlining complete Rachmaninov concerto cycles at the New York Philharmonic’s Rachmaninov Festival and with London’s Philharmonia Orchestra and the Munich Philharmonic; undertaking season-long residencies with the Berlin Philharmonic and at Vienna’s Musikverein, where he appeared with the Vienna Philharmonic and gave the Austrian premiere of his own Piano Concerto; and headlining the Berlin Philharmonic’s famous New Year’s Eve concert under Sir Simon Rattle.

Since making solo recital debuts at Carnegie Hall, London’s Wigmore Hall, Vienna’s Musikverein, Japan’s Suntory Hall, and Paris’s Salle Pleyel in 2012-13, Trifonov has given solo recitals at venues including the Kennedy Center in Washington DC; Boston’s Celebrity Series; London’s Barbican, Royal Festival and Queen Elizabeth Halls; Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw (Master Piano Series); Berlin’s Philharmonie; Munich’s Herkulessaal; Bavaria’s Schloss Elmau; Zurich’s Tonhalle; the Lucerne Piano Festival; the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels; the Théâtre des Champs Élysées and Auditorium du Louvre in Paris; Barcelona’s Palau de la Música; Tokyo’s Opera City; the Seoul Arts Center; and Melbourne’s Recital Centre.

In October 2021, Deutsche Grammophon released Bach: The Art of Life, featuring Bach’s masterpiece The Art of Fugue, as completed by Trifonov himself. Also including selections from the Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach, music by four of the composer’s sons, and two pieces known to have been Bach family favorites, Bach: The Art of Life scored the pianist his sixth GRAMMY nomination, while an accompanying music video, on which he performs his own completion of The Art of Fugue’s final contrapunctus, was recognized with the 2022 Opus Klassik Public Award. Trifonov also received Opus Klassik’s 2021 Instrumentalist of the Year/Piano award for Silver Age, his album of Russian solo and orchestral piano music by Scriabin, Prokofiev and Stravinsky. Released in fall 2020, this followed 2019’s Destination Rachmaninov: Arrival, for which the pianist received a 2021 Grammy nomination. Presenting the composer’s First and Third Concertos, Arrival represents the third volume of the DG series Trifonov recorded with The Philadelphia Orchestra and Nézet-Séguin, following Destination Rachmaninov: Departure, named BBC Music’s 2019 Concerto Recording of the Year, and Rachmaninov: Variations, a 2015 GRAMMY nominee. DG has also issued Chopin Evocations, which pairs the composer’s works with those by the 20th-century composers he influenced, and Trifonov: The Carnegie Recital, the pianist’s first recording as an exclusive DG artist, which captured his sold-out 2013 Carnegie Hall recital debut live and secured him his first GRAMMY nomination.

It was during the 2010-11 season that Trifonov won medals at three of the music world’s most prestigious competitions, taking third prize in Warsaw’s Chopin Competition, first prize in Tel Aviv’s Rubinstein Competition, and both first prize and grand prix – an additional honor bestowed on the best overall competitor in any category – in Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Competition. In 2013 he was awarded the prestigious Franco Abbiati Prize for Best Instrumental Soloist by Italy’s foremost music critics.

Born in Nizhny Novgorod in 1991, Trifonov began his musical training at the age of five and went on to attend Moscow’s Gnessin School of Music as a student of Tatiana Zelikman, before pursuing his piano studies with Sergei Babayan at the Cleveland Institute of Music. He has also studied composition, and continues to write for piano, chamber ensemble, and orchestra. When he premiered his own Piano Concerto, the Cleveland Plain Dealer marveled: “Even having seen it, one cannot quite believe it. Such is the artistry of pianist-composer Daniil Trifonov.”