Yefim Bronfman

Piano

Yefim Bronfman is one of a handful of artists regularly sought by festivals, orchestras, conductors and recital series. At the centre of this season is a residency with the Staatskapelle Dresden which includes all the Beethoven concerti conducted by Christian Thielemann in Dresden and on tour in Europe. Yefim Bronfman will also be performing Bartók concerti with the London Symphony Orchestra and Valery Gergiev in Edinburgh, London, Vienna, Luxembourg and New York. Recital performances will capture audiences with cycles of the daunting complete Prokofiev sonatas in Berlin, New York’s Carnegie Hall and Cal Performances, Berkeley. As a regular guest, Yefim Bronfman will return to the Vienna, New York and Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestras, the Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras and the Symphony Orchestras of Boston, Montreal, Toronto, San Francisco and Seattle.

Following the success of their first American tour last spring, Yefim Bronfman will re-join Anne-Sophie Mutter and Lynn Harrell in May for a European tour. Always keen to explore chamber music repertoire, his partners have also included Martha Argerich, Magdalena Kožená, Emmanuel Pahud and Pinchas Zukerman.

In 1991 he gave a series of joint recitals with Isaac Stern in Russia, marking Yefim Bronfman’s first public performances there since his emigration to Israel at age fifteen. That same year he was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize. In 2010 he was honoured as the recipient of the Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in piano performance from Northwestern University.

Widely praised for his solo, chamber and orchestral recordings, Yefim Bronfman was nominated for a Grammy Award in 2009 for his Deutsche Grammophon recording of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s piano concerto and in 1997 he won a Grammy Award, again with Salonen, for his recording of the three Bartók Piano Concerti. His prolific catalogue of recordings includes works for two pianos by Rachmaninoff and Brahms, the complete Prokofiev concerti, a Schubert/Mozart disc and the soundtrack to Disney’s Fantasia 2000. His most recent CD releases are the 2014 Grammy-nominated Magnus Lindberg’s Piano Concerto No 2, commissioned for him on the Da Capo label, Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 1, the recital disc Perspectives, complementing Yefim Bronfman’s designation as a Carnegie Hall “Perspectives” artist for the 2007-08 season and recordings of all the Beethoven piano concerti as well as the Triple Concerto for the Arte Nova/BMG label. Now available on DVD are his performances of Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto on Deutsche Grammophon, Beethoven’s fifth piano concerto and Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto on the EuroArts label. Scheduled for DVD release later this year are both Brahms’ concerti with Franz Welser-Möst and the Cleveland Orchestra.

Born in Tashkent. In the United States, he studied at the Juilliard School, Marlboro School of Music and the Curtis Institute of Music under Rudolf Firkušný, Leon Fleisher and Rudolf Serkin. He is a 2015 recipient of an honorary doctorate from the Manhattan School of Music. 
Yefim Bronfman became an American citizen in July 1989.