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Anatoly Liadov

Born May 11, 1855; Saint Petersburg, Russia

Died August 28, 1914; Polïnovka, Novgorod District, Russia

Kikimora, Op. 63

Anatoly Liadov often surfaces in music histories not as the composer of a handful of exquisitely crafted orchestral pieces, including Kikimora, but as the man who blew his chance to write The Firebird, which of course turned out to be a careermaker for Igor Stravinsky. According to the most familiar—though unsubstantiated— version, Liadov had only just gotten around to buying his manuscript paper when the first installment of his Firebird score was due, forcing Sergei Diaghilev, who was staging the ballet, to fire him from the job. But in fact, Liadov wasn’t even Diaghilev’s first choice—the assignment had originally gone to Nikolai Tcherepnin, who withdrew—and he declined Diaghilev’s offer from the start, for reasons we may never adequately understand.

Early on, Liadov had earned a reputation as a slacker. He regularly cut classes at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory—“he simply could not be bothered,” said Rimsky-Korsakov, who was his teacher and found him “irresponsible.” Sergei Prokofiev, who later studied with Liadov and admired him greatly, admitted in his memoirs that “Laziness was [his] most remarkable feature.” But from the start of his career, Liadov also had drawn attention for the boldness and orchestral brilliance of his compositions. As early as 1873—the time of his first songs, eventually published as his op. 1—Mussorgsky described his talent as “new, unmistakable, original.”

Igor Stravinsky, who owed his overnight fame to Liadov’s withdrawing, later said he liked Liadov’s music, but that Liadov “could never have written a long and noisy ballet like The Firebird.” (“He was more relieved than offended, I suspect, when I accepted the commission,” Stravinsky said.) Throughout his life, Stravinsky was quick to defend Liadov, claiming that he was a charming and cultured man—“He always carried books under his arm—Maeterlinck, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Andersen: he liked tender, fantastical things”—and, above all, that he was “the most progressive of the musicians of his generation.” composed

1909 first performance

December 1910; Saint Petersburg, Russia instrumentation two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, percussion, celesta, strings approximate performance time

7 minutes first cso performances

November 24 and 25, 1911, Orchestra Hall. Frederick Stock conducting

August 9, 1947, Ravinia Festival. Pierre Monteux conducting most recent cso performances

January 22, 1944, Orchestra Hall. Hans Lange conducting

July 19, 1997, Ravinia Festival. Yuri Temirkanov conducting

Liadov had championed Stravinsky’s own early works before others saw his genius, and once, in Stravinsky’s presence, he defended Scriabin, whose music had not yet found an audience. It’s hard to know what Stravinsky really thought of Liadov as a composer; he wrote admiringly of his sense of harmony and instrumental color, but he also called him “shortwinded”—that is to say, in words that Stravinsky could not bring himself to use, a master of the miniature. (This was, after all, the era of the Big Piece: Mahler’s Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth symphonies; Strauss’s Sinfonia domestica; and Schoenberg’s Pelleas and Melisande all date from the first decade of the twentieth century, the time of Liadov’s major works. Rachmaninov’s grand Third Piano Concerto, which concludes this week’s program, was composed the same year as Kikimora; Stravinsky began Petrushka a year later.)

Liadov’s catalog is slight: several songs and piano pieces, a handful of choral compositions, and less than a dozen small works for orchestra. His most successful compositions are the three brief descriptive orchestral pieces based on Russian fairy tales—Baba-Yaga, Kikimora, and

The Enchanted Lake—and they clearly demonstrate his mastery, precisely in an art form where Stravinsky made little headway.

Kikimora takes as its subject the legendary female house spirit of folklore who grew up in the mountains with a magician. As Liadov wrote, “from dawn to sunset, the magician’s cat regales Kikimora with fantastic tales of ancient times and faraway places as Kikimora rocks in a cradle made of crystal. It takes her seven years to reach maturity, by which time her head is no larger than a thimble and her body no wider than a strand of straw. Kikimora spins flax from dusk to dawn with evil intentions for the world.” Liadov begins simply, with shifting chords of deep darkness and a haunted melody in the english horn. Suddenly, with squealing winds and shuddering strings, the tale quickly rises to frantic heights, as Kikimora seeks vengeance on mankind. And then, just as suddenly, Kikimora disappears. It may not be the music of a composer ideally suited for the sweep of The Firebird, but as a short story of daring imagination, vivid character, and dark power, it is near perfection.

Igor Stravinsky

Born June 17, 1882; Oranienbaum, Russia

Died April 6, 1971, New York City

Petrushka

The Firebird was Stravinsky’s first big hit, and it made him famous, almost literally overnight, at the age of twenty-eight. Petrushka is that most difficult of artistic creations—the follow-up. The Firebird had not only made Stravinsky the talk of Paris, then the capital of the international art world—capturing the attention of the city’s biggest names, including Debussy and Proust—but it also had scored a huge success for Sergei Diaghilev, who had taken a risk hiring the young, relatively unknown composer to write music for the Ballets Russes’ 1910 season. Naturally, both men wanted another sensation for the next year.

Stravinsky already had an idea. While he was finishing the orchestration of The Firebird, he had dreamed about “a solemn pagan rite: wise elders, seated in a circle, watching a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring.” These powerful images suggested music to Stravinsky, and he began to sketch almost at once. (Early in his career, most of Stravinsky’s initial musical ideas were inspired by visual imagery.) At first he thought of it as a symphony, but when he played parts of it at the piano for Diaghilev early that summer, the impresario immediately knew that this was music for dance. With Diaghilev’s urging, Stravinsky continued working on the score that would eventually become their biggest sensation, Le sacre du printemps The Rite of Spring. But, in the meantime, Stravinsky got sidetracked.

When Diaghilev visited Stravinsky in Switzerland at the end of the summer, he was stunned to discover that the composer had begun a completely different work instead. As Stravinsky recalled, Diaghilev “was much astonished when, instead of the sketches of the Sacre, I played him the piece which I had just composed and which later became the second scene of Petrushka.”

For the second time that year, one of Stravinsky’s landmark ballet scores started out not as music to be danced, but as an unnamed abstract symphonic score. But unlike The Rite of Spring, Petrushka moved from sketch to stage without serious interruption. What had begun as just a detour from The Rite composed

August 1910–May 26, 1911

Reorchestrated, 1946 first performance

June 13, 1911; Paris, France.

Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Pierre Monteux conducting (complete ballet) instrumentation

1947 version: three flutes with piccolo, two oboes and english horn, three clarinets with bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, percussion, celesta, harp, piano, strings approximate performance time

34 minutes now became the main project of the year, and, at the same time, the score with which Stravinsky found his modernist voice— the voice that made The Rite possible. Musically, it had started innocently enough, almost as a kind of warm-up for The Rite. “I wanted to refresh myself,” Stravinsky later explained, “by composing an orchestral piece in which the piano would play the most important part.” The narrative and the title came later, although Stravinsky admitted that “in composing the music, I had in mind a distinct picture of a puppet, suddenly endowed with life.” (Petrushka is a Russian version of the male half of the Punch and Judy puppets.) As with The Rite of Spring, it was Diaghilev who immediately saw the potential in Stravinsky’s dazzling music for another dance classic:

[Diaghilev] was so much pleased with it that he would not leave it alone and began persuading me to develop the theme of the puppet’s sufferings and make it into a whole ballet. When he remained in Switzerland, we worked out together the general lines of the subject and the plot in accordance with ideas which I suggested . . . I began at once to compose the first scene of the ballet.

There were still a few details to be worked out, including Stravinsky’s fee (1,000 rubles) and the selection of the painter Alexandre Benois to polish the scenario and to provide costumes and scenery. (Michel Fokine soon signed on as choreographer and Pierre Monteux agreed to conduct the premiere.) With this extraordinary team lined up, Stravinsky and Diaghilev now had their sights set on surpassing the success of The Firebird. Aside from Stravinsky’s brush with nicotine poisoning in February 1911, work on Petrushka progressed smoothly. Rehearsals were a different story. The dancers and orchestral musicians, innocent of the terrors of The Rite of Spring, still no more than a pile of sketches, found the complexities of Stravinsky’s score almost unmanageable.

Opening night, however, was a great triumph, crowned by Vaslav Nijinsky’s brilliant dancing of the title role. Brash, bold, exciting, and in-your-face “modern,” Petrushka was another overnight hit with the public. For the next two years, until the legendary premiere of The Rite of Spring set Paris afire with fresh controversy, Petrushka was the latest word in musical modernism.

The scenario is in four scenes; the first and last are public, taking place on the Admiralty Square in Saint Petersburg, in the 1830s; the middle ones are set in private rooms and focus on individual characters. Petrushka opens with a busy first cso performances

November 21 and 22, 1930, Orchestra Hall. Frederick Stock conducting (suite)

July 9, 1937, Ravinia Festival. Ernest Ansermet (suite)

January 5 and 6, 1961, Orchestra Hall. Pierre Monteux conducting

July 9, 1977, Ravinia Festival. James Levine conducting cso performances, the composer conducting Between 1935 and 1964, Stravinsky conducted the CSO in selections from Petrushka on thirteen occasions at Orchestra Hall, the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee, and the Ravinia Festival. most recent cso performances

August 14, 1982, Ravinia Festival. Edo de Waart conducting (suite)

March 9, 10, and 11, 2017, Orchestra Hall. Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting cso recordings

1969. Carlo Maria Giulini conducting. Angel (suite)

1977. James Levine conducting. RCA

1993. Sir Georg Solti conducting. London opposite page: Costume designs by Alexandre Benois (1870–1960) for the ballerina and Petrushka, 1910. Images as reproduced in Ballet Design: Past and Present by C.W. Beaumont (1946) crowd scene, a kaleidoscopic panorama of street dancers, drummers, a magician playing a flute, a street musician with his hurdy-gurdy, and three puppets—Petrushka, a ballerina, and the Moor. Stravinsky shifts focus and shuffles events like a modern filmmaker: musical passages are cut and spliced, rhythmic patterns jostle one another. Finally the solo flute charms the three puppets to life and they join in a brilliant Russian dance.

The two middle scenes are more intimate, relying less on the full orchestra and built of more modestly scaled materials. In the first of these scenes, the spotlight falls on Petrushka, alone in his room, pondering his grotesque appearance and despairing over his inability to win the love of the ballerina. This is the music Stravinsky had first played for Diaghilev, with a piano solo “exasperating the patience of the orchestra with diabolical cascades of arpeggios. The orchestra in turn retaliates with menacing trumpet blasts. The outcome is a terrific noise, which reaches its climax and ends in the sorrowful and querulous collapse of the poor puppet.”

When he first began sketching Petrushka, Stravinsky was haunted by the image of a musician rolling two objects over the black and the white keys of the piano, which led him to the idea of a bitonal effect made by combining the white-note C major arpeggio with the blacknote F-sharp major arpeggio. This double-sided sonority dominates Petrushka’s scene (the first music Stravinsky wrote), and, as the work progressed, it came to represent the conflicting sides of his character—the human versus the puppet.

The Moor’s scene builds to a romantic encounter with the ballerina (she enters to a dazzling high trumpet solo). The lovers dance to waltzes borrowed, without apparent apology, from Joseph Lanner, an Austrian composer who was a friend of Johann Strauss, Sr. They are interrupted by the jealous Petrushka.

The finale is another surging crowd scene, characterized by various kinds of music pushing and shoving against each other. Petrushka enters, pursued by the Moor, who strikes him with his saber. Petrushka falls and the crowd grows silent. But when the magician is summoned, he demonstrates that Petrushka is merely a puppet stuffed with sawdust. The square empties. Then, as the magician drags the puppet off, he sees Petrushka’s ghost on the roof of the set, thumbing his nose. This, according to Stravinsky, “is the real Petrushka, and his appearance at the end makes the Petrushka of the preceding play a mere doll.”

Sergei Rachmaninov

Born April 1, 1873; Semyonovo, Russia

Died March 28, 1943; Beverly Hills, California

Piano Concerto No. 3 in D Minor, Op. 30

Although Rachmaninov’s music was once identified with the treacly romanticism of the Hollywood soundtracks it inspired, Rachmaninov himself was a serious and aristocratic artist. He was one of the greatest pianists in history—an astonishing virtuoso in the heroic tradition of Liszt— but there was nothing flashy about his stage manner. Rachmaninov was surprisingly somber and remote for a crowd-pleasing superstar. He rarely smiled or courted the audience, and even his closecropped haircut, of a kind that is ubiquitous today but was highly suspect at the time (like that of a convict, as the Russian bass Fyodor Chaliapin said), suggested a stern presence. (Chaliapin also scolded him for his curt, peremptory bows.) Much later, Stravinsky called him “a six-and-a-half-foottall scowl.” composed summer, 1909 first performance

Rachmaninov would have become famous if he had done nothing but concertize. But his true aspiration was to become a composer. At the Moscow Conservatory, his teacher Nikolai Zverev encouraged him to stick to the piano instead of writing music, but Rachmaninov tried his hand at composing some piano pieces and an orchestral scherzo, and he even started an opera, Esmeralda. Unable to choose between composition and performance, Rachmaninov ultimately decided to pursue both, eventually becoming a fine conductor as well. In 1889, the year he and Zverev parted ways, he sketched and abandoned a piano concerto, but the one he began the following year is his first major work—the one that became his op. 1. This is the score that made his name as a composer, and it was completed in a rush of passion and elation, with Rachmaninov working from five in the morning until eight in the evening and scoring the last two movements in just two and a half days. It would be ten years, however, before Rachmaninov finished his Second Piano Concerto, which quickly became his greatest hit and his calling card. He played it with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when he made his debut in Orchestra Hall, on December 3, 1909—the first of his eight appearances with the Orchestra.

November 28, 1909, New York City. The composer as soloist instrumentation solo piano, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, side drum, cymbals, bass drum, strings approximate performance time

44 minutes first cso performances

January 23 and 24, 1920, Orchestra Hall. The composer as soloist, Frederick Stock conducting

July 24, 1947, Ravinia Festival. William Kapell as soloist, William Steinberg conducting cso performances, the composer as soloist

January 14 and 15, 1932, Orchestra Hall. Frederick Stock conducting most recent cso performances

February 14, 16, and 17, 2019, Orchestra Hall. Simon Trpčeski as soloist, Pablo Heras-Casado conducting

August 7, 2019, Ravinia Festival. Denis Matsuev as soloist, Leonard Slatkin conducting cso recording

1967. Alexis Weissenberg as soloist, Georges Prêtre conducting. RCA

Although Chicago didn’t get to hear it, by then Rachmaninov had written a third piano concerto, tailor-made for his first North American tour in late 1909. Rachmaninov introduced the work in New York on November 28, with Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony. He played it there again in January, with Gustav Mahler conducting the New York Philharmonic (only weeks after Mahler’s own First Symphony, in its American premiere, was a flop). Rachmaninov was bowled over by Mahler’s meticulous rehearsal method—“the accompaniment,” Rachmaninov recalled, “which is rather complicated, had been practiced to the point of perfection”—by his attention to detail, and by his refusal to stop working until he was satisfied (rehearsal ran an hour overtime). The New York Times thought Rachmaninov’s playing occasionally lacked brilliance, but that “the orchestral accompaniment was outstanding.” The New York Herald, somewhat half-heartedly, called the work one of the “most interesting piano concertos of recent years,” but noted that “its great length and extreme difficulties bar it from performances by any but pianists of exceptional technical powers”—an assessment that still holds today. (Rachmaninov played the concerto when he appeared with the Chicago Symphony for the second time, in January 1920.)

Although in 1909 Rachmaninov was known as one of the great piano virtuosos, he began his new concerto not with solo fireworks, but with something of almost Mozartean clarity and understatement—a discreet accompaniment to which the piano adds a quiet, simple melody in bare octaves. It’s as plain and haunting as chant, and although Rachmaninov told musicologist Joseph Yasser that the theme came to him “ready-made,” Yasser wasn’t surprised when he later discovered a strikingly similar Russian liturgical melody. Rachmaninov said that he thought of the piano theme as a kind of song, and he took pains to find an accompaniment “that would not muffle this singing.” (He was understandably delighted with the care Mahler lavished on the orchestral part.) As the movement progresses, both melody and accompaniment are explored and developed at length, as is a lyrical second theme. The climax of the movement is the magnificent solo cadenza, as long and as tough as any in the repertoire, which takes the place of a formal recapitulation. (The piano writing is so symphonic, complex, and multifaceted that we barely notice that the orchestra has temporarily dropped out.)

In the middle-movement intermezzo—a curiously “light” title for music so big and involved— the piano’s entrance is both unmistakable and disruptive, for it takes control with its first phrase and leads the music in new directions (eventually settling in D-flat, an unexpected destination for a concerto in D minor). A “new” waltz theme, introduced by the clarinet and bassoon, over fancy piano filigree, is a cleverly disguised version—almost note for note—of the concerto’s monastic opening melody.

The finale, which begins fully formed while the intermezzo is still finishing up, is the kind of virtuosic tour de force Rachmaninov’s fans expected in 1909 and courageous pianists still love delivering today. It’s also richly inventive, with a fantastic, playful scherzando (in E-flat!) as a mid-movement diversion. The ending, predictably, is designed to test the limits of virtuosity and bring down the house.

Throughout Rachmaninov’s life, it was fashionable—if not in fact honorable in progressive music circles—to disparage his music. Rachmaninov had always worried that by splitting his time among playing the piano, conducting, and composing, he had spread himself too thin. “I have chased three hares,” he once said. “Can I be certain that I have captured one?” For many years, Rachmaninov’s stature as a pianist was undisputed. But by the time of his death in 1943 (he appeared with the Chicago Symphony for the last time just six weeks before he died), he had been written off in many quarters as an old-fashioned composer—sentimental, out of touch, irrelevant. As Virgil Thomson told the young playwright Edward Albee in 1948, “It is really extraordinary, after all, that a composer so famous should have enjoyed so little the esteem of his fellow composers.” The sacrosanct Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, in its fifth edition, published in the 1950s, concluded its dismal appraisal of his output: “The enormous popular success some few of Rachmaninov’s works had in his lifetime is not likely to last, and musicians never regarded it with much favor.” But in recent years, his star has decidedly been on the rise. Now, as Rachmaninov always hoped, it is his music and not his piano playing that keeps his name alive. Fittingly, for a composer who once inspired a generation of movie composers, Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto even played a leading role in Shine, the 1996 film about the Australian pianist David Helfgott and his heroic struggles with “Rach 3,” the most formidable of all piano concertos.

THE SUPREME VIRTUOSO: “THERE IS NOTHING HE CANNOT DO AT THE KEYBOARD”

Sergei Rachmaninov made his first appearances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on December 3 and 4, 1909, conducting his Isle of the Dead and performing as soloist in his Second Piano Concerto with Frederick Stock conducting. For more than thirty years, he regularly appeared in Chicago, both as recitalist and with the Orchestra, performing as soloist in his four concertos and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and conducting his Third Symphony and choral symphony The Bells.

He first performed his Third Piano Concerto, again with Stock on the podium, on January 23 and 24, 1920. Despite a nasty Chicago storm, Orchestra Hall was packed for the Friday matinee. “The concert of yesterday afternoon was an event,” wrote Karleton Hackett in the Evening Post. “I do not care what the verdict of twenty years from now may be regarding this concerto, for I have just listened to a performance of it that stirred me deeply. . . . It was a work of a man who understands the capacity of the instrument and can write for it in the fresh, vigorous idiom of our day such music as brings out its peculiar power and charm. What is quite as much to the point, he himself can play the instrument with a mastery that makes every phrase a delight. Rachmaninov has supreme virtuosity. There is nothing he cannot do at the keyboard, from the most exquisite delicacy of ornamentation to the downright stroke of elemental power. . . . The music was so vigorous, expressing so spontaneously the emotion of our own time that it seemed as though it were being struck out in the white heat of the creative impulse of the moment.”

In January 1932, the composer was again in Chicago for three concerts with Stock and the Orchestra. After a performance of the second concerto on January 12, Herman Devries in the American reported, “It was not Chicago . . . it was not Orchestra Hall . . . it was not Rachmaninov . . . to me it seemed Olympus, and we were all gods. Thus does music glorify when it is itself glorious. It is not the first time that I have waxed passionately enthusiastic over the genius of Rachmaninov. After hearing Horowitz [in recital] on Sunday [January 10], we thought that the season’s thrills were nearly complete.”

Later that week, on January 14 and 15, Rachmaninov was soloist in his third concerto. “The most exciting event in the history of Orchestra Hall occurred last night,” wrote Glenn Dillard Gunn in the Herald and Examiner. “With one impulse, the audience rose and shouted its approval. Many eyes were wet and many throats were hoarse before the demonstration ended. For once on their feet, the listeners remained to cheering after the Orchestra had trumpeted and thundered its fanfare and long after the composer-pianist had brought Dr. Stock to the footlights to share his honors. Never have I witnessed such a tribute . . . and never, it is my sincere conviction, has such response been so richly deserved.”

Rachmaninov’s final appearances with the Orchestra were on February 11 and 12, 1943, in Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto and his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, under the baton of associate conductor Hans Lange.

“Sergei Rachmaninov evoked a series of ovations when he appeared with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Orchestra Hall last night,” wrote Claudia Cassidy in the Chicago Tribune. “His entrance won standing tribute from orchestra and capacity audience, his Beethoven stirred a storm of grateful applause, and his own Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini ended the concert in a kind of avalanche of cumulative excitement.”

The following week, Rachmaninov traveled to Louisville and Knoxville for solo recitals on February 15 and 17, in what would be his final public performances. He died in Beverly Hills, California, on March 28, 1943.

Fabien Gabel Conductor

These concerts mark Fabien Gabel’s debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Fabien Gabel has established an international career of the highest caliber, appearing with such orchestras as the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, Minnesota Orchestra, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Tonkünstler Orchestra in Vienna, Oslo Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Praised for his dynamic style, he is best known for his eclectic repertoire choices ranging from core symphonic works to new music to championing lesserknown composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Gabel’s 2022–23 season has included many highly anticipated debuts, beginning with the BBC Proms with the BBC Symphony Orchestra followed by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and the Opéra de Paris leading Calixto Bieito’s production of Carmen, while in North America he makes debuts with the symphony orchestras of Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, and Baltimore. The season also includes return appearances with the Minnesota Orchestra, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Tonkünstler Orchestra in Vienna, Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Malmö Symphony Orchestra, Stavanger Symphony

Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de MonteCarlo, and West Australian Symphony Orchestra. Also this season, in Paris, he embarks on a large-scale project to record the music for Abel Gance’s 1927 epic silent film Napoléon with the Orchestre National de France and Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France in a production presented in theaters, live performances, and for online streaming.

Fabien Gabel regularly performs with Emanuel Ax, Yefim Bronfman, Bertrand Chamayou, Seong-Jin Cho, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Gidon Kremer, Augustin Hadelich, Simone Lamsma, Daniel Lozakovich, Christian Tetzlaff, Gautier Capuçon, Daniel Müller-Schott, Johannes Moser, Håkan Hardenberger, Emmanuel Pahud, Measha Brueggergosman, Natalie Dessay, Petra Lang, Jennifer Larmore, Marie-Nicole Lemieux, Danielle de Niese, and Michael Schade.

Having attracted international attention as the winner of the Donatella Flick Conducting Competition in 2004, Gabel was assistant conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra from 2004 to 2006 and music director of the Orchestre Symphonique de Québec from 2012 to 2021 and of the National Youth Orchestra of France from 2017 to 2021.

Born in Paris to a family of accomplished musicians, Fabien Gabel began playing the trumpet at the age of six and honed his skills at the Paris Conservatory and at the Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe. He played with various Parisian orchestras under such prominent conductors as Pierre Boulez, Sir Colin Davis, Riccardo Muti, Seiji Ozawa, Sir Simon Rattle, and Bernard Haitink before embarking on his conducting career.

Daniil Trifonov Piano

first cso performances

November 14, 15, and 17, 2012, Orchestra Hall. Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1, Charles Dutoit conducting most recent cso performances

October 18, 19, and 20, 2016, Orchestra Hall. Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto no. 3, Marin Alsop conducting

Grammy Award–winning pianist Daniil Trifonov, Musical America’s 2019 Artist of the Year, is a solo artist, champion of the concerto repertoire, chamber and vocal music collaborator, and composer, whose performances are a perpetual source of wonder to audiences and critics alike. With Transcendental, the Liszt collection that marked his third title as an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist, he won the 2017 Grammy Award for Best Classical Instrumental Solo.

In the fall of 2022, Trifonov headlined the season-opening galas of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington (D.C.) and, with the Philadelphia Orchestra, New York’s Carnegie Hall. Over the course of the current season, he returns to that venue, first as the last stop of an extensive North American recital tour, then for the first of three high-profile collaborations with Joshua Bell, and finally with the National Symphony Orchestra. Other 2022–23 season highlights include concerts with the New York Philharmonic; season-long residencies with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and daniiltrifonov.com twitter.com/daniil_trifonov facebook.com/daniiltrifonov.page Instagram.com/daniiltrifonov

Orchestre Philharmonique de 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 the 92nd Street Y in New York; and the release of Deutsche Grammophon’s new CD and Blu-ray edition of the best-selling, Grammy-nominated double album Bach: The Art of Life.

Trifonov’s DG discography also includes the Grammy-nominated live recording of his Carnegie Hall recital debut; Chopin Evocations; Silver Age, for which he received Opus Klassik’s Instrumentalist of the Year/Piano Award; and three volumes of works by Rachmaninov with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick NézetSéguin, of which two received Grammy nominations and the third won BBC Music’s 2019 Concerto Recording of the Year. In 2016 Trifonov was named Gramophone’s Artist of the Year, and in 2021 he was made a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government.

During the 2010–11 season, Daniil Trifonov won medals at three of the music world’s most prestigious competitions: third prize in in the Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, first prize in the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Tel Aviv, and both first prize and grand prize in the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.

He studied with Sergei Babayan at the Cleveland Institute of Music.