There is much to love in Daniil Trifonov’s salute to his adopted US (a second volume celebrating Latin America will follow), not least as it embodies the American immigrant dream the naturalised Trifonov is living, and in such a contrasting manner to some of his maudlin Russian forebears. This is a big, bold, brassy but touching double album bookended by piano concertos written a century apart. In between comes a varied assembly of solo piano works Trifonov feels ‘personally connected to’, much of it jazz and light music.

You can’t argue with his personal taste – though Mason Bates’s Piano Concerto will surely not prove ‘one of the great concertos of the 21st century’ as Trifonov asserts – and it’s the pianist’s revelling in Americana as well as his playing that sweeps you up. He has the fingers for his own transcription of Art Tatum’s fiendish I Cover the Waterfront, though it can feel tight, like a classical pianist learning an idiom. On the other hand, he has the looseness and lightness for Thomas Newman’s theme from American Beauty and Bill Evans’s arrangement of ‘When I fall in love’. Adams’s China Gates and Corigliano’s Fantasia on an Ostinato need to combine that with concealed rigour, and Trifonov delivers. Then he goes some more, offering not open-prairie Copland but the composer’s knotty Piano Variations in a probing performance that helpfully semaphores the theme wherever possible and doesn’t tiptoe around the dissonances.

And so to Gershwin’s Piano Concerto. In his Gramophone Collection on the piece (6/07), Jeremy Nicholas asked which pianists ‘made the piece laugh’, further citing the necessary ‘wit, passion, nonchalance and style’ required of soloists. After Trifonov’s tight Tatum one might ask: does his Gershwin swing? To an extent, yes; perhaps JN’s top choice, Hélène Grimaud (Erato, 3/98), still has some edge there, but Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s Philadelphia Orchestra is surely hard to match in recordings of the past few decades, on wondrous and fearlessly showy form – particularly the solo woodwinds and brass of the slow movement, full of space and air, and in the snap and crackle of the finale, in which it can sound like a real Hollywood orchestra (meant as a compliment). Both pianist and orchestra hug you in the big tune that ends the first movement and are thrilling in its chase-down. At the risk of projecting, to my ears Trifonov’s Gershwin has a touch of Rachmaninov to it; that might nicely illuminate Gershwin’s Slavic heritage or get in the way of the music’s brightness and swagger – up to you.

The concerto written for Trifonov by Mason Bates should probably be heard in the context of the pianist’s enthusiasm for America and his desire to commission a concerto that will satisfy orchestral concert audiences. Groundbreaking it is not, using plenteous off-the-shelf Americana, ticking the boxes marked ‘cinema’, ‘jazz’, ‘big country’ and ‘minimalism’ already lined up by the rest of the recital but admittedly putting much of that material through the mill – refracting it, reframing it, probing it and twisting it in a way Teddy Abrams’s recent American concerto for Yuja Wang (DG, 4/23) didn’t get near. The work does capture the all-American spirit of the last century in its broad tunes, brassy confidence and motorised rhythms, while its Martinů-like restlessness of tonality and modulating chord sequences offer some welcome grit in the oyster (the shape-shifting slow movement is the one I wanted to hear most). But there’s a difference between sounding like America for the sake of sounding like America and writing music that strives for something higher while sounding American by personal default (Adams, Higdon and so on).

To finish, something rather special. If all the music up to now sounds absolutely like America, Trifonov’s ‘field recording’ of Cage’s 4'33" goes one step further – capturing voices on streets and subways in a good reminder of why America sounds how it sounds. A beautiful full stop on a heartfelt and considered album, delivered with a refreshing smile – and first-rate musicianship.