A few weeks after winning the Rubinstein Competition, Trifonov was awarded the First Prize, Gold Medal, and Grand Prix at the XIV International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. Trifonov also won the Audience Award and the Award for the Best Performance of a Chamber Concerto. In a statement released after Trifonov's winning of the Tchaikovsky competition, Cleveland Institute of Music President Joel Smirnoff wrote: "In Mr. Trifonov, we are seeing the emergence of a major artistic interpreter of the piano literature. One must marvel at his remarkable performances in the recent Chopin, Rubinstein and Tchaikovsky competitions, and we look forward in the coming years to hearing and watching him share his special, expressive and virtuosic talents with the greater world." For the twelve months following the competition, Trifonov performed some 85 concerts; he received 150 offers, but said "at my age, 150 would be suicidal". One of these concerts took place shortly after the Tchaikovsky competition, in July 2011: Trifonov played a recital in Mannes School of Music as part of the International Keyboard Institute and Festival. Writing in "The New York Times", Anthony Tommasini noted that Trifonov "has scintillating technique and a virtuosic flair", but is "also a thoughtful artist and, when so moved, he can play with soft-spoken delicacy, not what you associate with competition conquerors". In October, in a review of a concert where Trifonov performed Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra conducted by Valery Gergiev at George Mason University's Center for the Arts, Anne Midgette of "The Washington Post" called Trifonov's playing "freakishly brilliant", but added that it wasn't always "easy or even enjoyable to hear" and left her "enervated and slightly disturbed". Midgette noted that "throughout the piece, routine patches or banging (was it a bad piano?) would yield to moments of startling precision that offered unexpected insights. Toward the end of the first movement, he played with such intensity that it seemed as if this moment was the greatest or most powerful thing that one could possibly experience. At that moment, for this 20-year-old pianist, it was." However, of Trifonov's encore, a Chopin Grande valse brillante, Midgette wrote that it "sealed the deal" that Trifonov "is a major artist in the making".