Mi Historia Americana: Sur

“I’m always happy when there’s more piano repertoire for people to discover,” Daniil Trifonov tells Apple Music Classical. The Russian-born pianist found ample cause for cheer in his choice of works for Mi Historia Americana – Sur(My American Story – South). The album, successor to My American Story – North, travels to Argentina, Brazil and the Andes, with alluring excursions to Cuba and the Dominican Republic. It embraces little-known solo piano pieces, the world premiere recording of a new suite for piano and orchestra by Osvaldo Golijov and Gonzalo Grau, and works infused with dance rhythms, nature and echoes of native and diasporic rituals. Mi Historia Americana – Sur opens with Aquarela do Brasil, Ary Barroso’s joyful late-1930s hit. Its samba vibe, glamorous orchestration and virtuoso keyboard part form the ideal overture. “I think it’s a great starter,” says Trifonov. The work’s thunderous finish sets the mood for Gabriela Lena Frank’s Sonata Andina, a potent blend of western classical and Andean folk traditions. While Frank’s score exploits the piano’s percussive qualities, Trifonov brings its singing voice to life in Sambubia No. 1 by Dominican composer Juan Francisco García, El vals de Santo Domingo by fellow Dominican Rafael Bullumba Landestoy, and Alberto Ginastera’s exquisite Milonga. Ginastera’s late Second Piano Sonata pivots between edgy modernism and Romantic reflection to create a work of tremendous substance. “It took a while to learn its complex language, but I really wanted to do this piece,” Trifonov confides. “What’s especially captivating in the second movement are these Harawi sounds, which we’ve had before in classical music with Olivier Messiaen.” The music, he explains, embraces the sorrowful Andean singing style, which features high-pitched female voices often accompanied by panpipes or flute. “If you listen to authentic Harawi singing and then compare it to how Ginastera put it on a piano, it’s very interesting. Of course, it doesn’t sound exactly like Harawi, but it creates a unique atmosphere on the piano.” Trifonov follows the Sonata’s fiendishly tricky finale with the jazz-infused warmth of Suntan by Dominican composer Michel Camilo. He was introduced to several shorter pieces by his pianist wife, a native of the Dominican Republic; others surfaced during COVID lockdown research periods. “The goal with both of my ‘American’ albums was to show the variety of music in the Americas,” Trifonov notes. “I looked to different sources of classical music and not only classical. There’s so much to Latin American music, with different cultures from different countries mixing.” The longest autobiographical strand on Mi Historia America – Sur leads back to Trifonov’s student days in Russia and his early experiences of playing Astor Piazzolla’s tango nuevo pieces. “Tango was always popular in Russia,” he observes. “Shostakovich wrote one, Schnittke wrote one, movie composers wrote tangos.” Eager to record music originally written for piano, he added his own Tango to the tracklist. “I wrote it when I was about 17 years old, before I left Moscow to study in Cleveland. That was one of the pieces I composed, perhaps under the impression of all the Piazzolla I had played before.” Dance drives the beating heart of Trifonov’s album, from tango and its precursor, the milonga, to samba, merengue and the sacred sarandunga. “The main thing, of course, is the rhythm itself,” he notes. “You need to just lose yourself in it. When you pay attention to the motion, then you start to feel the music within. I don’t think it’s necessary to know the dances well in terms of choreography or of doing them yourself. It’s to do with your perception of the movement in the music; it’s about being in love with the music. When playing Pictures at an Exhibition by Mussorgsky, it’s not necessary to be a great painter!” South American composers, he adds, have freely assimilated native, African and European influences. “The proportions vary with each piece, but you often find them in the same work. That’s what brings variety to this music.” All three are clearly present in Osvaldo Golijov and Gonzalo Grau’s Cuadros del Sur (Pictures of the South). This suite for piano and orchestra, commissioned for Trifonov and the Sao Paolo Symphony Orchestra, was built for an ensemble of 18 players by Grau from Golijov’s choral work from 2000, La Pasión según San Marcos (The Passion According to St Mark). “Osvaldo and Gonzalo wanted to create a work that was structurally like Pictures at an Exhibition,” Daniil Trifonov recalls. “That had never been done before, at least not in a concerto.” The opening “Promenade”, repeated six times throughout the work, echoes the theme associated with Christ in Golijov’s Passion oratorio. “The other sections are from different parts of the Passion, but they don’t follow the same order as in the Passion, and some of them have been reworked. In a way it’s a completely different piece. It was exciting to perform it in Sao Paolo without a conductor—it was about everyone listening attentively to each other: very much like a chamber-music experience.”