Daniil Trifonov: My American Story – North
Deutsche Grammophon

On this first volume devoted to the music of the Americas, pianist Daniil Trifonov explores the vast panorama of repertoire from the United States, the country the pianist has called home since emigrating from Russia in 2009 at seventeen to study with Sergei Babayan at the Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM). The proposed second volume, My American Story – South, will naturally shift the focus to the music of Latin America. For now, there's pleasure aplenty to be had from the inaugural set, available in digital, double-CD, and triple-LP versions.

Just as Trifonov opened himself up to everything his newly adopted home had to offer culturally upon arriving, My American Story – North ranges widely from classical and jazz to film music and popular song. Many of the selections are performed by the pianist alone and thereby lend the recording a personal stamp and intimate feel; however, towering over the solo pieces are two multi-movement works, George Gershwin's ebullient Concerto in F and Mason Bates's Piano Concerto, both of which couple Trifonov with The Philadelphia Orchestra and its Music and Artistic Director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. The inclusion of material by John Adams, Aaron Copland, John Corigliano, Dave Grusin, Thomas Newman, Art Tatum, and Bill Evans testifies to the recording's broad scope.

In truth, the latter two figures are present more perhaps by way of association given that the pieces to which their names are respectively attached, “I Cover the Waterfront” and “When I Fall in Love,” were written by John Green and Victor Young. Even so, Trifonov performs his transcription of Tatum's 1949 recording of the Green song and was inspired to cover Young's after hearing Evans's 1960 arrangement. Like many a listener and musician, Trifonov was stunned when first exposed to the virtuosity of Tatum, and certainly there's no shortage of it on display when Trifonov punctuates his swinging, stride-inflected treatment of “I Cover the Waterfront” with lightning-speed runs. In a very different presentation, he channels Evans's delicate touch and refined sensibility for a hushed rendering of “When I Fall in Love.”

It's primarily through these two tributes that jazz finds its way into Trifonov's release, though it's also part of the Grusin and Gershwin pieces. Composed in 1925, the latter's Concerto in F captures the United States as vividly as his better-known Rhapsody in Blue. Bluster, blues, and lyricism emerge in equal measure as an energized allegro initiates the thirty-two-minute presentation with one ravishing melodic turn after another. While gentler, the central movement, marked “Adagio – Andante con moto,” is no less engrossing, especially when the orchestration complementing the pianist is resplendent and the music enticingly blues-tinged. Surging furiously, the “Allegro agitato” concludes the work with a series of rapid gestures by soloist and orchestra alike, Trifonov operating at high velocity and the PO's strings, horns, and percussionists with him every step of the way. Every moment of the work bears Gershwin's signature, from its heartwarming melodies to its rhythmic urgency and exuberance.

To Trifonov's credit, he selected Copland's rarely recorded Piano Variations rather than something more familiar. With a theme and twenty variations packed into eleven minutes, the scenery changes quickly as the music switches from brooding moments to cryptic atonal explorations and back again. The Copland presented here isn't the easy-on-the-ears model we associate with Rodeo and Appalachian Spring but instead one intent on taking listeners on a challenging journey. By comparison, the incandescent sparkle of Adams's China Gates is easy to give oneself to, as is Corigliano's Fantasia on an Ostinato, exactly the kind of imaginative creation, in this case a thoughtfully conducted and at times solemn meditation on a quote from Beethoven's seventh symphony, we've come to expect from the American composer.

Like many, some of Trifonov's first impressions of the United States came from watching movies, and he gravitated to the two included on the release when both of their scores feature solo piano prominently. The finger-snapping swing of Grusin's “Memphis Stomp” derives from the soundtrack to the 1993 movie adaptation of John Grisham's The Firm; from the 1999 film of the same name, Newman's ever-so-delicate American Beauty opts for atmospheric introspection. Trifonov follows it with the world premiere recording of the concerto Bates wrote for him and that was premiered by the pianist, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and Nézet-Séguin in January 2022. Presented in three centuries-leaping movements, the work's a crowd-pleaser of the first rank, progressing as it does from the Renaissance-inspired dance moves and Copland-esque fanfares of the first to the gentle to-and-fro of orchestra and pianist in the romantic second and finally the effervescent drive of the Adams-flavoured third.

October 2024