Lenox — If you’ve never heard Daniil Trifonov play Rachmaninoff, then you will want to be at Tanglewood on opening night, Saturday, July 5, when he performs Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto—one of the most technically demanding and emotionally powerful works in the piano repertoire. It is a Trifonov specialty, reflecting his deep affinity for the Russian piano tradition—and for Rachmaninoff in particular. Few pianists today perform Rachmaninoff at Trifonov’s level.
Also, you will want to be at the Lenox Town Hall, 6 Walker Street, that same day at 2:30 p.m. to hear Boston University Professor Jeremy Yudkin deliver his first pre-concert lecture of the season. He will preview opening night and the full season, with a special focus on Tanglewood concerts you mustn’t miss. The remainder of his pre-concert talks will take place on Friday afternoons at 2:30 and Sunday mornings at 11.
Daniil Trifonov’s rise to the top of the classical music world has been astonishing. According to pianist Martha Argerich, he has “everything and more.” Whether performing solo, with orchestra, in chamber music collaborations, or even as a composer, Trifonov’s performances have been a reliable source of awe. Writing in The New Yorker, Alex Ross described him as having “a rare combination of monstrous technique and lustrous tone.” He added, “The characteristic Trifonov effect is a rapid, glistening flurry of notes that hardly seems to involve the mechanical action of hammers and strings.”
The Globe and Mail described Daniil Trifonov as “arguably today’s leading classical virtuoso,” while the Times called him “without question the most astounding pianist of our age.”
Trifonov won the 2018 Grammy Award for best instrumental solo album for his third Deutsche Grammophon release, “Transcendental.” He was named Gramophone’s artist of the year in 2016 and Musical America’s artist of the year in 2019. In 2021, the French government named him a chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Dr. Jeremy Yudkin has been nominated six times for Boston University’s highest teaching award. He has served as a visiting professor of music at Oxford and Harvard universities and as professeur invité at both the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris. Jeremy is the author of eight books and has contributed articles to such journals as the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Musica Disciplina, Speculum, Notes, the Musical Quarterly, Early Music, American Music, and Music and Letters. His writing has also appeared in the Salisbury Review, Berkshire Living, the Stanford Italian Review, and the American Journal of Philology.
As an author, Yudkin is best known for the textbooks “Music in Medieval Europe” and “Understanding Music,” a music appreciation text studied by more than 20,000 students across North America each year. He also writes about jazz: “The Lenox School of Jazz: A Vital Chapter in the History of American Music and Race Relations” (2006) and “Miles Davis, Miles Smiles, and the Invention of Post-Bop” (2009), which received an Award for Excellence in Historical Sound Research from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections.
On Saturday, July 5, hear Professor Jeremy Yudkin’s first pre-concert lecture of the Tanglewood season at Lenox Town Hall, 6 Walker St., at 2:30 p.m., followed at 8 p.m. by Daniil Trifonov’s performance of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto in the Shed at Tanglewood. Tickets are available here.
Jeremy Yudkin’s pre-concert Tanglewood talks are free thanks to the Lenox Library Association and Margery and Lewis Steinberg.
