RACHMANINOFF WITH TRIFONOV & BABAYAN - SOLD OUT
Sergei Babayan, piano - Daniil Trifonov, pianoWorld-renowned pianists Sergei Babayan and Daniil Trifonov—also former teacher and student—open Bravo! Vail’s Chamber Music Series with an all-Rachmaninoff program featuring two pianos.
Did you know?
Rachmaninoff is always an audience favorite, and his 150th birthday last year confirmed his popularity. His Symphonic Dances logged in as the most frequently played of all concert works in 2023. Here is an opportunity to hear its two-piano setting.
Featured Artists
Sergei Babayan
Daniil Trifonov
Sergei Babayan
piano
The meditative focus and rare stillness of Armenian-American pianist Sergei Babayan’s keyboard artistry prompted the Hamburger Abendblatt to liken him 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,” Babayan himself has observed that making music should be open to surprises and spontaneous insights, allowing unexpected emotions to emerge and subtle shadings to evolve naturally.
Sergei Babayan has collaborated with such conductors as Sir Antonio Pappano, David Robertson, Neeme Järvi, Rafael Payare, Thomas Dausgaard, Tugan Sokhiev, and Dima Slobodeniouk. Over the years, Babayan has performed with Valery Gergiev numerous times to great critical acclaim, including appearances at the Barbican Centre with the London Symphony Orchestra, at the Théâtre des Champs-Elyseés in Paris, the Salzburg Festival, and at the Rotterdam Philharmonic-Gergiev Festival, where Babayan was artist-in-residence.
In recent seasons, Mr. Babayan’s schedule included concert performances with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Toronto Symphony, Vancouver Symphony, and the Verbier Festival Orchestra, among others. Sergei Babayan regularly performs at many of the world’s most prestigious venues, including the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Carnegie Hall, London’s Wigmore Hall, the Vienna Konzerthaus and Munich’s Prinzregententheater, Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, the Maison de la Radio in Paris, Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, Alte Oper Frankfurt, and the Zurich Tonhalle.
He has appeared at major festivals including La Roque d’Anthéron, Piano aux Jacobins in Toulouse, Gstaad Menuhin Festival, and Verbier Festival. At Konzerthaus Dortmund, Sergei Babayan was a Curating Artist. Mr. Babayan performs with the world's foremost orchestras, including the London Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Warsaw Philharmonic, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre National de Lille, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.
Sergei Babayan is a Deutsche Grammophon exclusive artist; his latest release “Rachmaninoff” (DG 2020) was hailed by the international press as a groundbreaking recording and received numerous awards including BBC Recording of the Month and CHOC Classica (“This musical journey, born out of a limitless imagination and thought in minute detail, is one big masterpiece.”) His previous DG release of his own transcriptions for two pianos of works by Sergei Prokofiev, with Martha Argerich as his partner (“Prokofiev for Two”; DG 2018), was praised by reviewers as “the CD one has waited for” (Le Devoir), an “electrifying duo that leaves the listener in consternation” (Pianiste). Mr. Babayan's performances have been broadcast by Radio France, BBC-TV and BBC Radio 3, NHK Satellite Television, and Medici TV.
Born in Armenia into a musical family, Babayan began his studies there with Georgy Saradjev and continued at the Moscow Conservatory with Mikhail Pletnev, Vera Gornostayeva, and Lev Naumov. Following his first trip outside of the USSR in 1989, he won consecutive first prizes in several major international competitions including the Cleveland International Piano Competition, the Hamamatsu Piano Competition, and the Scottish International Piano Competition. An American citizen, he lives in New York City.
Daniil Trifonov
piano
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.”
Program Highlights
- Sergei Babayan, piano
- Daniil Trifonov, piano
PROGRAM CHANGE: 6.24.2024
SCHUMANN/arr. Sergei BABAYAN Andante and Variations, Op.46
MOZART Sonata for Two Pianos in D. major K 448
Allegro con spirito
Andante
Molto allegro
-INTERMISSION-
RACHMANINOFF Suite No. 1
RACHMANINOFF Suite No. 2
Program Notes
Fantaisie (Tableaux), Suite No. 1 for Piano Duet, Op. 5 (1893)
SERGEI RACHMANINOFF (1873-1943)
Fantaisie (Tableaux), Suite No. 1 for Piano Duet, Op. 5
Barcarolle
La nuit ... L’amour (The Night ... The Love)
Les larmes (The Tears)
Pâques (Easter)
Suite No. 2 for Piano Duet, Op. 17
SERGEI RACHMANINOFF (1873-1943)
Suite No. 2 for Piano Duet, Op. 17
Introduction
Valse
Romance
Tarantelle
INTERMISSION
Symphonic Dances, Op. 45
SERGEI RACHMANINOFF (1873-1943)
Symphonic Dances, Op. 45
Non allegro
Andante con moto (Tempo di valse)
Lento assai—Allegro vivace—Lento assai.
Come prima—Allegro vivace
When Sergei Rachmaninoff graduated from the Moscow Conservatory, in 1892, he was given the Great Gold Medal in composition, an honor that had been bestowed on only two students previously. Tchaikovsky, who was on the adjudicating panel, was so impressed that he gave Rachmaninoff the highest mark possible and then increased it by four plus-signs. Immediately following graduation, Rachmaninoff was signed to a publishing contract, and one of his first published pieces—his Piano Prelude in C-sharp minor—became an instant hit. Further works flowed forth, including his first opera, Aleko, produced at the Bolshoi in May 1893, and his Fantaisie (Tableaux) for Piano Duet. He wrote to a friend that he was “working on a fantasy for two pianos consisting of a series of musical pictures,” and he headed the movements with quotations drawn from 19th-century writers: Mikhail Lermontov, Lord Byron, Fyodor Tyutchev, and Aleksey Khomyakov, respectively. The four pieces are not programmatic depictions of the literary texts, but they do reflect their general moods. Lermontov writes, “At dusk half-heard the dull wave laps beneath the gondola’s slow oar,” which inspired Rachmaninoff to compose a slow, moody Barcarolle. The spirit does not change greatly for the second movement, for which Byron writes of a nocturnal nightingale. Bells seem to inhabit the remaining two movements—doleful funeral bells in “The Tears,” bells tolling the background to an Easter chant in the finale. Rimsky-Korsakov protested that the last movement would sound better without the bell effects, but perhaps he was grumpy because the piece rather resembled the Russian Easter Festival Overture he himself had written 15 years earlier. Tchaikovsky, on the other hand, was an enthusiast, happily accepting the work’s dedication and vowing to attend its public premiere—a promise aborted by his sudden death.
When Rachmaninoff produced his Suite No. 2, in 1901, people started calling the Fantaisie (Tableaux) his Suite No. 1, which remains common usage today. The Second Suite has no literary connections, its four movements tracing standard musical genres. The exuberant Introduction (marked Alla marcia) is followed by a spirited waltz that works in a sly reference of the funeral chant Dies irae, which would resurface as a fingerprint in multiple ensuing compositions. The Romance is a love song, and the concluding Tarantella leaps forth with an unmistakably Russian accent, even though Rachmaninoff said he borrowed the theme from a collection of Italian songs. The composer’s advance beyond the idiom of the First Suite is unmistakable. He had been through a crucible in the intervening years. He had reacted to the failure of his First Symphony, in 1897, by going silent as a composer, and the Suite No. 2 was one of the first pieces he wrote when coaxed back into action through psychological therapy.
The Symphonic Dances take us to the end of the composer’s career. He had left Russia in 1917, when the nation collapsed into revolution, and lived the rest of his life elsewhere, principally in the United States though also passing extended periods of his later years at the lakeside villa he built in Switzerland. He toured busily as a soloist, gaining a reputation as one of his era’s supreme pianists, and he earned parallel acclaim as a composer and conductor. He spent the summer of 1940 at an estate near Huntington, Long Island, and it was there that his final work, the Symphonic Dances, came into being. He initially planned to name the piece Fantastic Dances, which would have underscored their vibrant personality. He also pondered titling the three movements “Noon,” “Twilight,” and “Midnight”—or, as his biographer Victor Seroff recounted the story, “Morning,” “Noon,” and “Evening,” meant as a metaphor for the three stages of human life. He scrapped those ideas in favor of the more objective name Symphonic Dances. The spirit of the dance does indeed inhabit this work, if in a sometimes mysterious or mournful way.
Having completed his working score, he developed it in two directions more-or-less simultaneously—into the colorful orchestral setting and into a version for two pianos. In September 1940, his friend Vladimir Horowitz traveled out to Long Island for a visit, and there he joined Rachmaninoff in performing the piano-duet version for a private audience. Among the attendees was the composer’s old friend Michel Fokine, the one-time choreographer of the Ballets Russes, who immediately signaled his interest in using it for a ballet; regrettably, Fokine died in 1942 before he could make good on his intention.
The opening march-like movement is powerful and assertive. Its coda presents a gorgeous theme. This melody has not been previously heard in this piece, but that doesn’t mean it was actually new; Rachmaninoff borrowed it from his First Symphony, which had remained unpublished and unperformed since its disastrous premiere so many years before, an autobiographical vindication of that early effort. A waltz follows, though more a doleful Slavic waltz than a lilting Viennese one. To conclude, Rachmaninoff offers a finale that includes quotations from Russian Orthodox liturgical chants and from his signature Dies irae. Both would seem odd allusions for what are, after all, identified as dances. But Rachmaninoff subsumes his borrowed material brilliantly into the general spirit of the Symphonic Dances, and near the end of the manuscript—the last pages he would ever complete—he inscribed, in Roman script, the word “Alliluya.”
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