Recording of the Week, Daniil Trifonov's (North) American Story

After initially having studied in Moscow, Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov moved to the USA at the age of eighteen to study with Sergei Babayan at the Cleveland Institute of Music, beginning a life-long exposure to the many different styles that comprise American music. His latest album presents a distillation of these experiences, retracing what the booklet notes describe as an "immigrant's journey in the New World" with an eclectic mosaic of pieces ranging from Copland and Gershwin to more recent compositions by John Corigliano and Mason Bates, taking in a healthy dose of jazz and film music along the way.

It was during his time in Cleveland that Trifonov first discovered the performances of the great jazz pianist Art Tatum, and indeed it is Trifonov's own transcription of Tatum's 1949 version of Johnny Green's I Cover the Waterfront that kicks things off here. One of the qualities of Tatum's playing that caused him to be so revered by jazz and classical pianists alike was the almost superhuman dexterity of his right-hand embellishments. It's quite a statement of intent to begin an album with a recreation of such prodigious facility, but of course Trifonov is more than up to the task, with dazzling cascades of notes combining with an easy, classy swagger in the left-hand accompaniment.

Trifonov makes sure to represent other genres, from the hypnotic minimalism of John Adams's China Gates to the world of film music with Thomas Newman's hauntingly bewitching theme from American Beauty and a mighty, barnstorming rendition of Dave Grusin's Memphis Stomp from the 1993 film, The Firm (including one seemingly impossible section where, without disturbing or interrupting his impeccable rhythm in the slightest, Trifonov appears to play all the music in one hand while clicking his fingers with the other...).

For the two most substantial works on the album, Trifonov is joined by the Philadelphia Orchestra under conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who expand upon the jazzy mood with a lively, slick account of Gershwin's Piano Concerto (including a pleasingly sultry trumpet solo in the second movement). This is paired with the world premiere recording of a piece written for Trifonov in 2022, the Piano Concerto by Mason Bates. It's an ideal microcosm of the ideas at play in the album as a whole, with its three movements exploring a range of styles, variously hinting at the genres of jazz, film music and minimalism that Trifonov has performed earlier, whilst also taking in wider allusions to Renaissance music and the more Romantic tradition of piano concertos in the vein of Rachmaninoff (a nod to Trifonov's heritage). It's a highly enjoyable piece that is brilliantly despatched by Trifonov and the orchestra.

As something of a postscript to the album after this energetic performance of the Bates concerto, Trifonov includes John Cage's notorious 4'33", written, as the score indicates, "for any instrument or combination of instruments", but in which the performers do not actually play anything, the effect being created instead by the ambient sound that occurs naturally during a performance.

As it happens, the vinyl edition offers a couple of bonus tracks, including a studio version of this Cage piece (the other is a Trifonov arrangement of a track from the popular video game, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim), but the performance on the CD/digital edition is described as a "Field Version: Cage @ Columbus", and is simply a recording of Trifonov walking the few hundred metres from New York City's Columbus Circle subway station to the open space of Central Park. It's a fascinating listen, during which we hear the noise of trains, station announcers, birdsong, traffic, children laughing and so forth. Initially when I saw it on the album's list of contents I was worried it might be a bit of a gimmick, and I won't pretend that it's a track I plan on listening to over and over again, but in context it certainly serves its purpose as an encapsulation of the melee of different sounds that are thrown into the melting pot that is American music in the twentieth century and beyond. I understand that the sequel album ("South") is to follow, and I can't wait to hear it!