Simon Trpčeski

MAKEDONISSIMO is the project by which he is now most readily recognised outside the concert hall: Macedonian folk material rebuilt by the composer Pande Shahov for a virtuoso chamber group, first given in 2018 and heard in an orchestral version in Vienna in 2023. Trpčeski was born in Skopje in 1979 and studied there with Boris Romanov at Ss Cyril and Methodius University, taking his degree in 2002. A first prize at the Yamaha Music Foundation of Europe competition in 1998 and second place at the Millennium competition in London in 2000 led to selection as a BBC New Generation Artist and, in 2003, to the Royal Philharmonic Society's Young Artist Award. He has played with more than a hundred orchestras across four continents, and the Russian repertoire is where he is most closely identified: the complete Rachmaninov concertos with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic for Avie, Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev for Onyx, Shostakovich for Linn, and Brahms with the WDR Sinfonieorchester in 2023. Macedonia gave him its Presidential Order of Merit in 2009 and made him, in 2011, the first holder of the title National Artist. He made his Wigmore Hall debut in 2001 and returned there as resident artist in 2018, when two of his recitals were issued on the hall's own label; Daniel Müller-Schott is a regular chamber partner. His first album took the Editor's Choice and Debut Album prizes from Gramophone in 2002, and the Rachmaninov cycle later won a Diapason d'Or. With the Macedonian arts organisation KulturOp he works regularly with young musicians at home.