Daniil Trifonov, age 20, performing Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No. 1 (S. 514) during the first round of the 2011 International Tchaikovsky Competition, where Trifonov was awarded first prize.
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Trifonov was born in 1991, in Nizhy Novgorod (USSR) as an only child. His father was a composer and his mother was a music teacher. Trifonov began learning the piano at the age of five, gave his first solo concert at seven and gave his first performance with an orchestra (where he notably lost one of his baby teeth during his performance of a Mozart concerto) at the age of eight. At age nine, he entered the prestigious Gnessin School of Music in Moscow and became a pupil of Tatiana Zelikman, (who herself was a student of Heinrich Neuhaus, who taught the likes of Emil Gilels and Radu Lupu). After studying with Zelikman for nine years, and at her recommendation, Trifonov commenced studies with Sergei Babayan at the Cleveland Institute of Music, with whom he studied from 2009-2015.

Because of traditional reflexes, the audience stopped to listen to the music but Satie and Milhaud kept saying « Whatever you do, don’t listen! »… And that’s the day what we now know as background music was born. As a true avant-garde artist and a serial jokester, with that experience, Satie wanted to do away with the idea of music happening as an organized and paid for event. During that intermission, music was therefore a non-event, a piece of furniture in the grand scheme of things, just like lighting or heating. What was seen as a joke then is our life now, and it even has a name, « elevator music »: shops, elevator, bars, restaurants… Every moment is a musical one and it’s barely noticeable because it should not be. It’s ironic that the Gymnopédies, written way before Satie’s concept, eventually became mainstream elevator music.