Scriabin

Hailed by the music press as one of the most gifted pianists of her generation and recipient of many international awards, established German-Italian pianist and ECHO winner Sophie Pacini invites us on a very personal journey across the pianistic cosmos. In her own words: “On this album, I have combined pieces which have accompanied and reassured me in seemingly small, but ultimately crucial moments of my life.”

Firma Melodiya presents an album with recordings of Alexander Scriabin’s, Julian Scriabin’s and Boris Pasternak’s works performed by Ludmila Berlinskaya, an Honoured Artist of Russia and prize-winner of prestigious international competitions.

Winning first prize at the 1989 Van Cliburn Competition, Alexei Sultanov enjoyed a meteoric rise of epic proportions, with a major recording contract, Carnegie Hall recital, American and European tours, and TV appearances with Johnny Carson, David Letterman, and other notables. But Sultanov's star soon fell to Earth as critics would often characterize his bold style in unflattering terms, finding his interpretive manner feral and superficial, and his herculean fortes ostentatious: he broke a string during a performance of the Liszt First Mephisto Waltz at the Cliburn Competition. But the youthful pianist's health soon proved a more formidable opponent than any critic's pen, as a series of strokes sabotaged his career, eventually leaving him paralyzed on his left side after 2001. Though he died at 35, Sultanov left a memorable though controversial legacy. His Prokofiev, Chopin, Rachmaninov, and Scriabin could rivet the listener, while his Beethoven and Mozart might have been less consistently engaging. His recordings, mostly available from Warner Classics, document the enormous talent of this imaginative performer, a pianist unafraid to take interpretive chances.

Scriabin composed most of his single-movement fourth symphony The Poem of Ecstasy between 1905 and 1908 in Italy and France. He originally intended it to be called Poème orgiaque (‘Orgiastic Poem’) with its unprecedented raw sensuality and overpowering aesthetic, taking chromaticism beyond even Wagnerian voluptuousness. His earlier Symphony No. 2 in C minor adopts César Franck’s cyclical ideas to which Scriabin layered sweeping climaxes, majestic intensity and rich orchestral colour that enliven its five movements with ceaseless invention.

As a composer of orchestral music, Alexander Scriabin is best known for his last two idiosyncratic symphonies, the Poem of Ecstasy and Prometheus: The Poem of Fire, which are essentially symphonic poems, not symphonies in the conventional sense. The Symphony No. 1 (1900) and the Symphony No. 2 (1901), however, are more recognizable as symphonies in their multiple-movement forms, and their durations are comparable to the expansive symphonies of Scriabin's contemporary, Gustav Mahler. They also share the post-Romantic tendency toward Wagnerian harmonies, rhapsodic melodies, and lush orchestration, which, in Scriabin's case, were developed to express heightened emotional states and mystical transcendence. This 2016 double SACD by Valery Gergiev and the London Symphony Orchestra presents each of the symphonies on its own disc, and the high-quality multichannel sound is ideal for bringing across the subtle nuances of tone color and the shifting of dynamics that are characteristic of his style.]

John Ogdon's 1971 recordings of Alexander Scriabin's piano sonatas and other works for piano may not be the first choice of devotees of the mystical Russian composer, but this EMI Classics twofer is highly recommended. Those well-acquainted with Scriabin's music will likely hold particular recordings as indispensible – Roberto Szidon's on Deutsche Grammophon, Vladimir Ashkenazy's on London, and Marc-André Hamelin's on Hyperion are celebrated sets – yet in terms of technique and interpretation, Ogdon's performances are every bit their equal and should not be discounted for being less touted.

The Scriabin piano sonatas, performed here by American pianist Ruth Laredo, provide a musical biography, outlining the composer’s career and his stylistic progression. The New York Times praised Laredo's “sensuous, beautifully controlled playing," which expressed the “mad and slightly evil quality” of Scriabin’s work.

This CD's title, Messe Noire, and its dark cover art may mislead some into thinking this album is filled with evil, forbidden things; but the only selection that suggests the diabolical is Alexander Scriabin's macabre Sonata No. 9, "Black Mass," and it comes at the very end, after Igor Stravinsky's light, neo-Classical Serenade in A, Dmitry Shostakovich's sardonic Sonata No. 2, and Sergey Prokofiev's witty but brutal knuckle-buster, the Sonata No. 7, which all have their dark moments, certainly, but not the same sinister mood found in Scriabin. If pianist Aleksei Lubimov's aim in bringing these Russian masterworks together points to some other unifying idea – perhaps the significance of the piano in these composers' thinking – then some other title might have been more helpful. As it is, though, this album seems most unified in Lubimov's vigorous style of playing, brittle execution, and emphasis on the piano's percussive sonorities, evident in each performance. This spiky approach works best in Prokofiev's sonata, and fairly well in Shostakovich's and Stravinsky's pieces; but it seems too sterile in Scriabin's music, which needs more languor and sensuous writhing than clarity or crispness.