<<  -- 5 --  John Bell Young    SCRIABIN ON DISC

SONATAS

Complete and partial sets. Of the several complete sets of the sonatas, only Szidon's is really worth talking about, as he plays circles around the rest of them (DG, NA). His performances are in technicolor, irresistibly vivacious, dramatic and rhythmically compelling. He is the only pianist among them who understands and fully exploits the music's sexual subtext, which Scriabin so succinctly expresses in the push and pull of cumulative rhythmic thrusts. By comparison, the others are just prudes.

Though Boris Berman's performances are thorough and idiomatic, on the whole they gravitate towards the dry and academic (Music & Arts). He is not one to exaggerate anything, which in some cases is admirable but compromises musical drama and poetry. Zhukov's vastly overrated Scriabin playing is bourgeois, timorous and dull, as if he were in need of some kind of interpretive Viagra (Melodiya). I never cared much for Ponti's readings which, though expertly played, are superficial; he plays every sonata as if it were little more than a virtuoso salon piece by Liszt or Thalberg, and thus an occasion to show off. Though he is an authentic virtuoso and can play Scarlatti and some works of Liszt exceptionally well, he is out of his depth in Scriabin.

Ogdon is visceral and athletic, pigheadedly ignoring Scriabin's implicit eroticism and sensuality, but succeeding, with a kind of nuclear intensity, in spite of it (EMI; 2CD). There's an electrical quality about it all, and he delivers jarring, neurotic and engaging performances that fascinate and indulge the music at every turn. However, in a group of miniature works, Ogdon is just terrible, eviscerating them of all charm and mystery. Hamelin delivers technically pristine but studentish readings that miss the point entirely; his fabulous fingers never miss a note, but he has neither the sound nor the sensibility for this music (Hyperion). His is a sensibility entirely unsuited to Scriabin's peculiar demands, failing to grasp anything of the music's spiritual and sexual ideology. Ruth Laredo's Scriabin is flabby, sentimental, over-pedaled, indulgent for all the wrong reasons, rhythmically wayward, and consistently inaccurate (Connoisseur Society).

Save for Laredo, Taub is probably the worst of the lot; he plays Scriabin as if he were delivering a physics lecture at Princeton. His readings, note perfect but hopelessly cold and dead inside, suggest Scriabin after a vasectomy, without a chance for a procedural reversal. Dubourg's dreary, stillborn readings are awful in virtually every category; they are so bad in fact that they make Laredo sound like Sofronitsky (Tudor). Glemser plays sympathetically enough, though he favors tempos that are either uniformly the same or too fast, with a bright gloss in places where something darker and tense is needed (Naxos). Though I have long admired Ashkenazy's exemplary technique and musicianship, to say nothing of his textual thoroughness and tense athleticism, in this music his sound is opaque and his hands heavy (London). His Scriabin wants desperately for mystery, longing, sensuality and sexual energy.

Of the partial sets, Vladimir Sofronitsky remains unsurpassed (Melodiya and Denon LPs). He never met Scriabin but married one of his daughters, and identified with the music to a degree that borders on the supernatural. He recorded all but the 1st and 7th sonatas, and his readings were for the most part recorded in concert. What informs his Scriabin, aside from an intimate familiarity with the old traditions that govern its interpretation, is intimacy, passion and drama, coupled to textual transparency. None of the CD transfers (from Denon; Arlechinno; and Melodiya/BMG) have captured the richness and dimensions of Sofronitsky's tone as persuasively as the original LPs.

Michel Block's now out-of-print performances of 3, 6 , 9 and 10 are as atmospheric as they are subtle and exemplary (EMI). His sensual reading of 2 is available (ProPiano 4), but one longs for its sister sonatas, which he plays even better. Won't someone please reissue these superb performances? Horowitz, who was perhaps an even more instinctive pianist than Sofronitsky, brings Scriabin to life, too, and without fear of exaggerated affect when needed, which is often. His readings of several études from Opp 8 and 45, the 2 Poèmes of Op 69, Feuilllets d'album Op 45:2 and Op 58, and Vers La Flamme have been gathered on one disc (Sony 534672). Horowitz's Scriabin is a sweet, honeyed affair. His phrasing is coy and tailored almost to the point of fussiness; indeed, there is something of the dandy and vaguely feminine about Horowitz in relation to Scriabin. But there's nothing in the least wrong with that, and in fact, Scriabin himself exhibited similar traits in his own character.

Nor should anyone ignore the mighty Richter, whose frenetic, super-charged and often bellicose Scriabin, though not uniformly persuasive, captures much of the composer's apocalyptic sensibility in edge-of-your-seat performances (Music & Arts). But do ignore Glenn Gould, whose ill informed, grotesquely distorted, arrhythmic and asensual playing makes a travesty of Scriabin (Sony). His recordings amount to little more than a joke, and not even a funny one at that.

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