Friends and collaborators Daniil Trifonov and Joshua Bell ready for the road

Note: Due to illness, the Joshua Bell/Daniel Trifonov recital has been postponed. The rescheduled date is March 29. Tickets for March 2 will be honored then. For more information, contact the box office.

Two of the greatest soloists on the classical-music scene also happen to be longtime friends. And now violinist Joshua Bell and pianist Daniil Trifonov have joined forces for a tour that’s selling out venues such as Carnegie Hall in New York City and Symphony Hall in Boston.

The two are internationally acclaimed as soloists and collaborators. Their program, which consists of a trio of sonatas by Beethoven, Prokofiev and Franck, highlight both sides of their exceptional talents. They will appear in a Symphony Center Presents Chamber Music recital March 2.

Few if any pianists have earned the kind of accolades that Trifonov has in the last decade, especially considering that he is just 31 years old. In 2016, he was named Gramophone magazine’s artist of the year, and then three years later, he won the same distinction from Musical America. Those two high-profile honors have followed a series of major recording prizes, including a Grammy Award in 2018 for “Transcendental,” his solo Liszt release.

Alongside such awards are rapturous reviews from top critics worldwode. In September 2021, for example, New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini wrote of the Russian pianist after he joined the New York Philharmonic in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4: “As we have come to expect from this remarkable artist, he played magnificently — by turns daring and sensitive, impassioned and poetic.”

Born in Nizhny Novgorod, Trifonov began piano lessons at age 5 and made his professional debut three years later. He went on to study with Tatiana Zelikman at Moscow’s famous Gnessin School of Music and ultimately completed his education in the United States with Sergei Babayan at the Cleveland Institute of Music. He had already gained awards in some earlier contests, but he catapulted to instant stardom in 2011 when he won first prize at the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition in Tel Aviv and then took top honors at the even more prestigious International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. Two months later, he punctuated his victories with his Carnegie Hall debut with Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra.

After his March recital, Trifonov returns to the Windy City and joins the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, under Fabien Gabel, in Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in concerts April 20-23 (wth concert April 21 at Wheaton College). 

Trifonov has regularly played big, showy works by the likes of Rachmaninov and Prokofiev, but he has never felt hemmed in by the big, muscular stereotypes that sometimes surround Russian keyboardists. His repertoire is expansive, as evidenced by his 2021 recording “Bach: The Art of Life,” on Deutsche Grammophon. It includes J.S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue, as well as works by four of his sons and two pieces that were known to be Bach family favorites.

Before the pandemic, Trifonov presented a recital program that included some of the works that would ultimately appear on the album. “I was, of course, supposed to play it many more times, but everything was suspended, so I had time to delve even more into this music,” he said. He found himself being pushed “deeper and deeper into the music,” sometimes practicing as much as eight hours a day. “There is so much clarity in the music and so much harmony,“ he said. ”The mind does not get tired while practicing.”