Daniil Trifonov & Philadelphia Orchestra & Yannick Nezet-Seguin – My American Story: North – CD

With his latest album, Trifonov retraces his immigrant’s journey in the “New World”, through American piano scores ranging from jazz and swing to modernism, minimalism and popular soundtracks. The project is chronologically bookended by two great American piano concerti composed almost a century apart: George Gershwin’s audacious, jazzy 1925 Piano Concerto in F, and the world premiere of Mason Bates’ effervescent Piano Concerto, commissioned for Trifonov and premiered by the pianist with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra (the recording preserved here) in 2022. The album also includes the Piano Variations (1930) by Aaron Copland, a transcription of Art Tatum’s 1949 recording of “I Cover the Waterfront” by Daniil Trifonov, Bill Evans’s slow, contemplative, harmonically lush version of “When I Fall in Love”, themes from Hollywood films The Firm and American Beauty, as well as John Cage’s iconoclastic 4’33 (1952) Trifonov was a young man when he left Moscow for a life in America. My American Story – North completes a part of the musical autobiography he has been writing all along. The album’s sequel, My American Story — South, will showcase the music of Latin America, a region he has also come to call home.

Disc: 1
1 Cover the Waterfront
2 I. Allegro – Daniil Trifonov/The Philadelphia Orchestra
3 II. Adagio – Andante Con Moto – Daniil Trifonov, The Philadelphia Orchestra
4 III. Allegro Agitato – The Philadelphia Orchestra, Yannick Nzet-Sguin
5 Piano Variations
6 When I Fall in Love
7 China Gates

Disc: 2
1 Fantasia On an Ostinato
2 Memphis Stomp
3 American Beauty
4 I. – Daniil Trifonov, The Philadelphia Orchestra, Yannick Nzet-Sguin
5 II.
6 III. – Daniil Trifonov, Yannick Nzet-Sguin
7 4’33 (Field Version: Cage @ Columbus)