COMPOSERS: Scriabin
LABELS: CRD
ALBUM TITLE: Scriabin
WORKS: Morceaux, Opp. 51, 52 & 57; Feuillet d’album, Op. 58; Deux Pièces, Op. 59; Poème-Nocturne, Op. 61; Poèmes, Opp. 63, 69 & 71; Préludes, Opp. 67 & 74; Vers la Flamme, poème, Op. 72; Deux Danses, Op. 73
PERFORMER: Paul Crossley (piano)
CATALOGUE NO: 3524
Scriabin’s late piano pieces remain among the most revolutionary ever written for the instrument. Whether ecstatic, febrile, languorous or terminally exhausted, their supercharged harmony and aphoristic phrases give them the character of fleeting moments of vision, snapshots of spiritual elation or depression. Paul Crossley, in his notes for this excellent CRD release of the complete short pieces composed between 1906 and 1914, asserts that for all their fragmentary nature they have a ‘perfection of style matched to idea’, a balance and consistency that renders them superior even to Scriabin’s contemporary last Sonatas. These Morceaux, Poèmes, Danses and Préludes certainly call for a player of unusual insight, able to catch their evanescent expression on the wing and with the requisite technical command to give substance to the insubstantial. In all this Crossley succeeds admirably – and in the only two pieces that evolve a sustained argument, the exquisite Op. 61 Poème-Nocturne and the visionary Vers la Flamme, he admirably projects their sense of structure and maintains, in the latter piece, the almost unbearable tension of its cumulative build-up. There are surprisingly few rivals in this collection of late pieces – Ogdon (EMI) and Ashkenazy (Decca) use them to intersperse the complete sonatas and even Roger Woodward (Etcetera) throws in Nos 6 and 10. There’s not much to choose between Woodward (who’s a mite better recorded) and Crossley, but in a close comparison Crossley sounds more authoritative, more completely at home in the music’s uncanny imaginative world. Calum MacDonald