Carnegie Hall

Tonight’s orchestra brings together more than 100 extraordinary young professional musicians who are all alumni of Carnegie Hall’s National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America (NYO-USA). Created just over a decade ago, NYO-USA launched with its inaugural Carnegie Hall concert and international tour in 2013, thrilling audiences from the start. In the years since, two complementary ensembles have been added: NYO2 for outstanding younger classical musicians (ages 14–17) and NYO Jazz for the nation’s finest jazz instrumentalists (ages 16–19), each led by an all-star faculty of professional musicians. Each summer, Carnegie Hall now brings together more than 200 of the country’s finest young musicians to make up these three ensembles, as they take part in an intensive training residency, perform at Carnegie Hall, and embark on tours to some of the great music capitals of the world, serving as America’s music ambassadors. Musicians from Carnegie Hall’s national youth ensembles connect with peer musicians and audiences around the globe, demonstrating firsthand the power of music to connect people across cultures. Over the last decade, nearly 1,500 young musicians have performed in 17 countries on four continents, spotlighting the musical excellence found across the United States and transforming countless lives. More than 100 alumni of NYO-USA have joined major orchestras and ensembles around the world including the New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, The Cleveland Orchestra, The Met Orchestra, Royal Danish Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, The Philadelphia Orchestra, Houston Symphony, National Symphony Orchestra, and more.

NYO-USA has been praised for “exuding vitality and confidence” (The New York Times) in its performances. Following annual concerts at Carnegie Hall, NYO-USA has toured to Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Since 2013, the orchestra has been invited to perform at leading international festivals and on landmark stages around the world, including the BBC Proms in London, National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing, Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Lotte Hall in Seoul, Lucerne Festival, and Teatro Mayor in Bogotá, among many others. In the more than 10 years since the ensemble’s creation, NYO-USA has worked with extraordinary conductors and guest artists, including Marin Alsop, Emanuel Ax, Joshua Bell, Sir Andrew Davis, Joyce DiDonato, Daniel Harding, Sir Antonio Pappano, Carlos Miguel Prieto, David Robertson, Gil Shaham, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Alisa Weilerstein.

Montreal-born Yannick Nézet-Séguin was appointed music director of New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2018, adding this to his music directorship of The Philadelphia Orchestra (where he has served since 2012) and to his post at the Orchestre Métropolitain de Montréal, of which he has been artistic director and principal conductor since 2000. Mr. Nézet-Séguin joined the late Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Bernard Haitink to become the third-ever honorary member of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in the 2016–2017 season. The end of his 10-year tenure with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra coincided with the orchestra’s centenary celebrations in its home city, culminating in an acclaimed European summer festivals tour in 2018.

Mr. Nézet-Séguin has worked with many leading European ensembles and has enjoyed many close collaborations with the Berliner Philharmoniker, Vienna Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and Chamber Orchestra of Europe, as well as with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, of which he was principal guest conductor from 2008 to 2014. He has appeared several times at the BBC Proms and many European festivals, among them Edinburgh, Lucerne, Salzburg, Berlin, and Grafenegg. North American summer appearances include the Mostly Mozart, Lanaudière, Vail, and Saratoga festivals. Once chorus master, assistant conductor, and music adviser at Opéra de Montréal, he has since conducted at the Teatro alla Scala; Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; Netherlands Opera; Vienna State Opera; and the Salzburg Festival.

Grammy Award–winning pianist Daniil Trifonov is a solo artist, champion of the concerto repertoire, chamber and vocal collaborator, and composer. Combining consummate technique with a rare sensitivity and depth, his performances are a perpetual source of wonder to audiences and critics alike. He won the Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Solo Album of 2018 with Transcendental, the Liszt collection that marked his third title as an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist.

Mr. Trifonov undertakes major engagements on three continents in the 2023–2024 season. He performs Brahms’s First Piano Concerto with The Cleveland Orchestra; Brahms’s Second with the Los Angeles Philharmonic; Robert Schumann’s Concerto with the New York Philharmonic; Mozart’s “Jeunehomme” Concerto at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, and other venues with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra; Chopin’s First Concerto with the Orchestre de Paris; Mason Bates’s Concerto—a work composed for him—with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, and Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin; and Gershwin and Rachmaninoff concertos with The Philadelphia Orchestra at home and on a European tour. In recital, he tours to Europe with cellist Gautier Capuçon and takes a new solo program to cities ranging from Vienna, Barcelona, and Milan to Boston, San Francisco, and New York.

Mr. Trifonov’s Deutsche Grammophon discography includes the Grammy Award–nominated live recording of his Carnegie Hall recital debut; Chopin Evocations; Silver Age, for which he received the Opus Klassik Instrumentalist of the Year Award; the best-selling, Grammy Award–nominated double album Bach: The Art of Life; and three volumes of Rachmaninoff works with The Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, two of which received Grammy Award nominations while the third won BBC Music Magazine’s 2019 Concerto Recording of the Year. Named Gramophone’s 2016 Artist of the Year and Musical America’s 2019 Artist of the Year, Mr. Trifonov was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2021.

During the 2010–2011 season, Mr. Trifonov won medals at three of the music world’s most prestigious competitions: third prize in Warsaw’s Chopin International Piano Competition, first prize in Tel Aviv’s Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition, and both first prize and Grand Prix in Moscow’s International Tchaikovsky Competition. He studied with Sergei Babayan at the Cleveland Institute of Music.