SILVER AGE

The title of Daniil Trifonov’s new album, Silver Age, recorded with Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra, recalls a time when Russia’s composers, poets, artists, dramatists and star performers were among the most original anywhere in the world. The artistic audacity and brilliance of this turbulent era in the country’s history is illustrated with Daniil Trifonov’s choice of works by three of its most pioneering composers, Scriabin, Prokofiev and Stravinsky.

“Scriabin,” he notes, “wished to combine all aesthetic experience in a single, mystical, musical vision; Stravinsky unified the arts through a radical re-interpretation of ballet; Prokofiev, meanwhile, embraced cinema as the most complete and modern synthesis of the senses.”