Scriabin reviews

In many respects, Vasily Petrenko is the ideal interpreter for this ripe overheated music with its strong echoes of Liszt, Wagner and Tchaikovsky. He knows instinctively how to sustain momentum, particularly in the Second Symphony’s more repetitive sequential passages. He also ensures that Scriabin’s propensity for unleashing constant surges in sound in the faster-paced movements does not become self-defeating, and that the biggest climaxes of all really have the greatest impact. 

Daniel Jaffé

In 1915, the year of Scriabin’s death, Rachmaninov performed the composer’s Fifth Sonata in his memory. As Prokofiev recalled, when Scriabin ‘had played this sonata everything seemed to be flying upward; with Rachmaninov all the notes stood firmly planted on earth’. Peter Donohoe and Garrick Ohlsson take a similarly down-to-earth approach to Scriabin’s rapturous music in their recordings of the complete sonatas – which is not to say they achieve comparable results.

In 1915, the year of Scriabin’s death, Rachmaninov performed the composer’s Fifth Sonata in his memory. As Prokofiev recalled, when Scriabin ‘had played this sonata everything seemed to be flying upward; with Rachmaninov all the notes stood firmly planted on earth’. Peter Donohoe and Garrick Ohlsson take a similarly down-to-earth approach to Scriabin’s rapturous music in their recordings of the complete sonatas – which is not to say they achieve comparable results.

Johannes Moser and Andrei Korobeinikov bring both muscle and imagination to these two epic Russian sonatas. The danger with both is of surfeit: of volume, density, sheer length and repetitiousness of material. In the Prokofiev players must be prepared – as these are –  to throw themselves into the circus ring, as well as indulge in the marvellously profound resonance of its C major lyricism. In the Rachmaninov, again, subtlety of articulation and elasticity are essential in its broad narrative sweep.

Not since Gordon Fergus-Thompson’s outstanding Scriabin series for ASV has the other-worldly, deeply sensual aspects of this extraordinary music been brought so alluringly to life. Where other pianists have a tendency to play up the profound debt owed to Chopin in the earlier sets (Opp. 11–17), Anthony Hewitt looks forward to the psychedelic dreamworlds conjured by Scriabin’s later work. As a result, some may find the super-heated cut-and-thrust of the E flat minor Op. 14 No. 11, or the Appassionato No. 20 a shade underpowered.

Scriabin’s first two symphonies featured here, though far less seminal in their importance than his later symphonies, nonetheless show more than glimpses of the genius that so enchanted his professors at the Moscow Conservatory.

The first thing one registers in Daniel Levy’s Beethoven is its exceptional clarity of articulation. The upward flight of Sonata No. 5’s opening statement comes smart as a whip, with the answering statement bringing warm sweetness. And in the first movement’s development section he finds a new touch to match the new key, suggesting exploration of an unfamiliar realm.

Taking the late 19th-century’s popular cultural interest in theosophy to its outer limits, Scriabin believed that the world’s ills could only be cured through a single cataclysmic event. Having also fallen under the influence of Nietzsche, he became convinced that he was the person destined to bring about this universal change, to be fulfilled by his gargantuum Mysterium; he sketched its opening section before dying from an infected sore on his upper lip.

Following the turn of the last century, Scriabin’s use of rhythm, harmony and melody turned increasingly supple as his music became progressively amorphous. In place of the tonal certainty of his earlier work, the later piano pieces – especially those entitled ‘poème’ or with overtly programmatic associations – have an increasing tendency to leave the listener suspended. It is this period that is traced by the 34 super-compressed miniatures embraced by Garrick Ohlsson in this programme, from the Deux poèmes Op.