In the cd booklet it is neatly explained: that with My American Story – North Daniil Trifonov relives his immigrant journey in the 'New World' through American music, ranging from jazz and swing to modernism, minimalism and popular soundtracks. "I didn't want to record an anthology," he says. "These are simply pieces with which I feel personally connected. My favorites that speak to me musically."
This lively mosaic of repertoire, says Trifonov, "has introduced me to many of the perspectives, styles, cultures, places, people, stories and expressions that shaped and influenced my American experience."
The project is framed by two great American piano concertos almost a century apart: George Gershwin's daring, jazzy Concerto in F from 1925, and Mason Bates' equally sparkling Piano Concerto, specially composed for Trifonov and first performed by him in 2022 with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin (also represented on this album). Fortunately, both works offer more substantively than just a virtuosic showcase.
Trifonov moved from Russia to the United States in 2009 to study at the Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM) with Sergei Babayan. There he discovered Art Tatum and called his recordings his first experience with jazz. Having grown up with a constant stream of Scriabin, Rachmaninoff and other Russian greats, the astonished student was deeply impressed by Tatum's ingenuity and sparkling virtuosity.
Vladimir Horowitz reportedly said about Art Tatum: "If he were to seriously take up classical music, I would resign the next day." Tatum was born in nearby Toledo, Ohio, and played in Cleveland for years before landing on the stage of 52nd Street in New York. Trifonov pays tribute to the African-American keyboard wizard and musical pioneer with his own auditory transcription of Tatum's 1949 recording of I Cover the Waterfront.
Gershwin was a contemporary of Tatum who expanded the riffs and grooves of American jazz into the classical idiom. Trifonov first heard Gershwin's Concerto in F as a teenager in Moscow and was immediately seized by the desire to perform it.
The album also contains perhaps the most canonical American composer, Aaron Copland. Instead of a work suggesting the gently rolling hills and open prairies often associated with Copland's name, Trifonov has chosen the tense, dissonant and rarely recorded Piano Variations (1930), which he calls both a masterpiece and the "most challenging to play" of the compositions on My American Story .
More than anything, My American Story – North (the follow-up album, My American Story – South, will present the music of Latin America) can be described as a love story: about Trifonov's affection for his adopted home and love for the life – and family – he has built there. We hear this sentiment echoed in the slow, contemplative, harmonically lush version of When I Fall in Love by jazz pianist Bill Evans. Trifonov first heard Evans' recording of the jazz standard from 1960 while scrolling through a playlist and indeed… fell in love. "There is a sincerity in the expression," he says, "that for me characterizes the best qualities of this authentically American musical genre."
Film music is another typically American genre. Before Trifonov arrived in Cleveland, his first impressions of America were based on Hollywood films, a few of which he had seen in the cinema during his youth in Moscow, at the beginning of the millennium. Once in Cleveland, Babayan and his classmates provided a complete immersion in American culture, including 'must see' films ranging from The Godfather trilogy to Mel Brooks' The Producers.
Memories of Sam Mendes' 1999 dark comedy film American Beauty and the adaptation of John Grisham's novel The Firm from 1993 also left a memorable impression. Both soundtracks offered Trifonov an apt musical entry point. Dave Grusin's Memphis Stomp, from The Firm, draws on the vibrant blues and ragtime rhythms of the American 'Deep South' that pianists like Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis transformed in the fifties into the foundation of rock 'n' roll. Meanwhile, Thomas Newman's theme from American Beauty is piano music at its most cinematic: atmospheric and introspective.
Pioneers such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass have characterized minimalism as a style that conflates 'the American ethos of eternal movement' with modal patterns and harmonic progressions, which according to Trifonov creates an efficient, mesmerizing dynamic. John Adams' China Gates (1977) and John Corigliano's Fantasia on an Ostinato (1985) both employ their minimalist 'tools' with contrasting effects: while Corigliano bases his meditation on a quotation from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, China Gates is a sonic painting of nature, where the cyclical eighth notes suggest the delicate tapping of rain in California spring, a study in contrasts of light and shadow. For Trifonov, minimalism and naturalism are closely intertwined.
The Piano Concerto by Mason Bates is in a sense a summary of Trifonov's very personal American journey. Bates has explored many of the musical characteristics that Trifonov has included in his album. "The first movement is a witty, playful homage to the Renaissance," says Trifonov. "The second movement, in the Romantic tradition, is a soulful dialogue between the orchestra and the pianist. The third movement is eccentric and rhythmic, with a cinematic drive. I appreciate it when you can hear where music comes from. Mason's piece is one of the great concertos of this century – and it could only have been written in America!"
After his years of study in Cleveland, Trifonov lived for a time in New York City. With his young Russian-Latino family, he is nowadays at home in both North and South America. If he were not a pianist, Trifonov says, he would have liked to have been an urban planner. His sensitivity to the characteristic features of landscapes and urban cityscapes is evident in the connections he makes between the music he plays and the environments in which he lives. Trifonov's 'Field Version' of John Cage's iconoclastic 4'33" (1952) captures the essence of that connection: a journey from the Columbus Circle metro station in New York City, through the bustle of North America's most populated, densest and diverse city, to the green, open space of Central Park. A walk of a few hundred metres that Trifonov has made countless times, and which encompasses the sound and spirit of this chapter in his American story. Thus the commentary of Julian Sancton and Oscar Alan.
What more is there to add? Only that it is a magnificent release, both in terms of the idiomatically styled interpretations and the recordings.