Mody is a very good pianist and a joyful musician: he masters the technical problems with esprit, his pedaling is pleasingly lean, but above all he has an extremely colourful sound spectrum and an imaginative, improvisational approach to Scriabin's inner worlds." Klassik-heute "Pervez Mody is an extraordinary musician and a unique artist" Martha Argerich, 2009

Following her recent, well-received recordings of Glass, Nyman, and the �tudes of Chopin and Schumann, pianist Valentina Lisitsa now records works of Scriabin. For the composer's 100th anniversary in 2015, Valentina delves into his lesser-known works and finds some beautiful gems. All the works included are recorded for Decca for the very first time.

Second instalment in the ongoing symphonic cycle Scriabin/Ono. The grandiose and particularly colourful Third Symphony by Alexander Scriabin in an opulent and gorgeous account by Kazushi Ono conducting the Brussels Philharmonic. This music demands the highest possible degree of sheer beauty of tone by the orchestra. Here it is achieved thanks to the musicians and the conductor, but also thanks to the avantgarde Dolby Atmos/Immersive recording by MotorMusic studio. EPRC 0061, Scriabin: Symphony no.2 was 2024 Critic's Choice by American Record Guide. Classic Voice (ITA): "The outcome is no less than overwhelming." BBC Music Magazine (UK): "The Brussels Philharmonic strings relish Scriabin's ardent and sensuous melodies."

Nineteen years after his first recital devoted to the music of Alexander Scriabin [BIS-1568], Yevgeny Sudbin returns to the works of this eccentric Russian composer with a new recital that brings together pieces composed at various points in his career. Of his special relationship with this composer, Sudbin writes: 'I simply cannot think of any other composer who consistently brings out such a primordially raw and physical reaction in me and, with time, his grip has only intensified on me.' Arthur Rubinstein once said that 'Scriabin's music is like a narcotic. It is so intoxicating that it can become dangerous', to which Sudbin adds by way of precaution, 'enjoy responsibly at your own peril.' Carefully prepared by Sudbin, the programme reveals Scriabin's stylistic evolution, from his beginnings when he was still influenced by Chopin and devoted to small forms, through his middle period where the rich, late-romantic idiom is just beginning to cross into darker, more complex realms, on to his late period in which, in Sudbin's words, 'one sometimes feels too close to the edge of insanity'. In his latter works, Scriabin indeed seems to push music to the expressive limits in order to create a climate of spiritual ecstasy.

Jeneba Kanneh-Mason's debut solo album is out now! 'Fantasie' takes you on a journey that explores connections across different composers' sound worlds. From Claude Debussy, Fr�d�ric Chopin and Alexander Scriabin to Florence Price, Margaret Bonds and William Grant Still, Jeneba presents a programme which is also very personal to her as an artist.

Is there a more singular composer than Alexander Nikolayevich Skrjabin (1872-1915)? Light years away from those of his Russian contemporaries, his original trajectory is that of an incandescent comet in the musical firmament of his time, whose thousands of lumens are suddenly extinguished at it's zenith... all because of the ridiculous insect bite to which he succumbed. An exalted Icarus, captivated by the infinite and yearning for mystical ecstasy, traces his first steps within the legacy of Fryderyck Chopin (1810-1849). His youthful works, bearing in their refined lines the seeds of his boundless creativity, find under Clement Lefebvre's touch an expressive power and a poetic motion of rare elegance.

Mountain Worlds, Soul Flight

Ugorski seems to be getting closer and closer to the spirit of the music. An attractive proposition indeed.



SCRIABIN Piano Sonatas Nos. 1–10 • Anatol Ugorski (pn) • AVI 8553195 (2 CDs: 159:25)


First, let it be said that there is “complete,” and then there is “COMPLETE.” This set contains not quite Scriabin’s entire works designated “sonata.” Others—namely Roberto Szidon’s and Michael Ponti’s long-available Deutsche Grammophon and Vox Box sets—include the unnumbered E?-Minor Sonata and the G?-Minor Sonata-Fantaisie (not to be confused with the Sonata No. 2 in G?-Minor, subtitled “Sonata-Fantasy”) that are not included on Ugorski’s new set. But then, versions by Yakov Kasman on Calliope and Vladimir Stoupel on Audite, both summarily trashed by Peter Rabinowitz in Fanfare 29:3 and 32:4, don’t include them either. Oddly, the Hyperion set with Marc-André Hamelin, which Rabinowitz holds in high regard, and which I happen to have in my collection, does include the early, unpublished G?-Minor Sonata-Fantaisie but not the unfinished student Sonata in E?-Minor. One wonders why Hamelin chose to include the Fantaisie , op. 28, instead.


Anatol Ugorski never quite seemed to catch on with American audiences or critics. Born in 1942 in Siberia, he studied at the Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) Conservatory, and quite promptly upset the Soviet apparatchiks by insisting on playing works by Schoenberg, Berg, Messiaen, and Boulez. In 1968, the powers that be declared him a danger to society, and exiled him to 10 years’ penance as a piano accompanist for choir concerts by the Young Pioneers, a fate probably worse than confinement to a mental institution. By 1982, the authorities considered him sufficiently rehabilitated to appoint him professor at the Leningrad Conservatory. But in 1990, he fled with his family to Berlin, in the face of threats by the increasingly anti-Semitic nationalist Pamyat Party. He has remained in Germany, concertizing and recording, and teaching at the Hochschule für Music in Detmold up until 2007.


Ugorski’s recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon yielded a number of noteworthy releases, among them Scriabin’s Piano Concerto with Pierre Boulez and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (the only one of his CDs I find reviewed in the Fanfare Archive), Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux , Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition , Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations , discs of Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Debussy, and a no-longer-listed fantastic two-disc set I have of the Brahms sonatas.


I suspect that Rabinowitz would not care for Ugorski’s Scriabin any more than he did Stoupel’s, of which his main complaint was their slowness. I haven’t heard Stoupel, but Ugorski is definitely on the slow side of Hamelin. Here’s a comparison of their timings:


Sonata Ugorski Hamelin


1 27:16 21:41


2 12:47 12:19


3 22:42 19:37


4 8:40 7:58


5 13:55 12:46


6 15:23 11:08


7 13:36 11:24


8 17:00 12:09


9 10:33 8:40


10 16:09 11:42


In every case, Ugorski is slower by a significant margin, but the differences in two of the sonatas in particular, the Eighth and 10th, struck me as so extreme that I wondered if there was a misprint or if the two pianists were playing the same piece. Having listened to them one after the other, I can confirm that indeed they are the same, but Ugorski’s understanding of Scriabin’s Moderato marking and Hamelin’s are poles apart.


The 10th Sonata itself is almost Webernesque; groups of seemingly isolated intervals flutter furtively by, separated by secretive silences. One would have to stretch the definition of Moderato all the way out to Larghissimo to accept Ugorski’s reading as anything close to normative, but I couldn’t help liking it. Hamelin plays it very beautifully, achieving some exceptionally colorful bird-like effects—Hamelin’s note author, Simon Nicholls, alludes to Messiaen’s “luminous, vibrant trills” and the “trembling of insect wings”—but Ugorski goes for a different effect. It’s like being in a state of suspended animation; everything happens in a surreal, slow-motion condition of altered consciousness.


In the case of the Eighth Sonata, Ugorski’s protracted opening Lento is not dramatically slower than Hamelin’s; it’s in the Allegro agitato where the two pianists part company. Ugorski picks up the tempo, but ambles amiably along as if tempo were the only thing that has changed. Hamelin takes off like a jackrabbit, bringing out the proto and protean jazz elements and, again, the music’s Messiaen-like klangfarbe.


Scriabin’s early music is said to be heavily influenced by Chopin and somewhat less so by Liszt, but in these 10 sonatas he quickly moved from a relatively conventional late-Romantic idiom to something that becomes quite difficult to describe. The last five sonatas are written without key signatures, and many passages flirt with non-serialized atonality. Scriabin was an iconoclast, a mystic, a theosophist, a synesthesist, and, toward the end, possibly delusional. Both the man and his music are very complex, and it’s precisely the complexities and contradictions in these sonatas that allow for interpretations as divergent as Ugorski’s and Hamelin’s.


I can’t help but wonder if the slowness Rabinowitz complained of in Stoupel’s performances may be a Russian thing, for here we have Ugorski, another Russian pianist, who believes slow is the way to go. I wouldn’t be too quick to dismiss Ugorski (or Stoupel) on these grounds, for in addition to all of his other emotional baggage, Scriabin too was Russian. Might one legitimately ask if the French-Canadian Hamelin knows better than Ugorski the bleakness of the Russian spirit and the blackness of its soul?


Much as I like Hamelin’s approach—it’s from his recording I came to know these sonatas, and it can be hard to overcome first impressions—I find Ugorski’s take on these sonatas fascinating. His technical control, as in everything I’ve heard him play, is phenomenal; he knows what he wants to say and he makes the instrument say it. His tone has amazing authority and depth to it, which the recording captures faithfully. I will not be disposing of my Hamelin, but Ugorski will definitely vie for equal play time. The two are so different that if you’re a Scriabin devotee, I’d urge you to acquire both. If you can only afford one, I guess I’d recommend sticking with Hamelin, but only because his readings are probably more mainstream. But this new Ugorski set gets a very strong recommendation.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins


For many listeners, the wealth of Scriabin recordings on the market must be something of a mystery. It's not that the music is unworthy of this exposure, it clearly is, but more that its saleability is questionable to say the least. The answer, I think, lies in the relationships between record labels and their star pianists. Scriabin is first and foremost a pianist's composer, a creator of works that separate the men from the boys and, just as importantly, allow the performer to present unique and subjective interpretations without going against the spirit of the music.
 
All of these features are very much in evidence with Anatol Ugorski's new recording of the sonatas. Ugorski had a short but stellar international career in the 1990s, framed by his moving from Russia to the West in 1992 and his subsequent decision to give up performing to concentrate on teaching. So what would it take to lure him back into the studio after an absence of around ten years? You guessed it. And how are the results? Well, they are certainly distinctive.
 
The first thing that struck me about Ugorski's playing is the sheer dexterity of his technique. Late 50s isn't necessarily all that old for a pianist, but from the suppleness of the playing here, you'd think you were listening to a teenager. The interpretation is a different story, and Ugorski's grasp of this music is clearly the result of decades of close study.
 
It would be difficult to defend this recording against accusations of over-indulgence. Many of the movements are far slower than you will hear elsewhere, and there are all sorts of pauses, gaps and elongations that can't in all fairness be described as Scriabin's own. But I don't hold any of this against Ugorski. I love the way that he lives for the moment and imbues every phrase with almost claustrophobic atmosphere. The recording technology really helps this approach, with the piano placed in a warm acoustical environment. This is especially evident in the resonance of the piano upper register - those quiet held chords washing around inside the lid and refusing to disappear. The dynamic range of the recording, and of the performance itself I suspect, is greater than you'll hear on recordings by, for example, Ashkenazy or Ogdon, which is a real boon for Scriabin's variegated and complex textures.
 
The downside is a lack of linear focus. Scriabin's melodies, especially in the later works, are difficult to follow at the best of times, but here are often reduced to little more than frameworks for the harmonic and contrapuntal textures. Such are Ugorski's priorities and consistency of approach that he invites the interpretation of this inverted musical hierarchy as a legitimate performance decision. Whether or not you agree is another matter.
 
The ordering of the sonatas is clever, with each disc beginning in the earlier, more digestible repertoire, and then gradually moving into the composer's more esoteric later works. That would be a sensible approach in any box set of the sonatas, but is particularly valuable here, given the expansive and, yes, indulgent nature of the readings.
 
I would normally hesitate to recommend eccentric recordings of key works to those unfamiliar with them, but in this case I'm willing to make an exception. He is a real individual, Anatol Ugorski, and he has produced a left-field recording of music that, even in more conservative hands, is itself eccentric. Perhaps that's the point: this is a strange interpretation to say the least, but with every wayward decision, Ugorski seems to be getting closer and closer to the spirit of the music. Add to that the precision of his technique, the sheer athleticism of his playing and the superior audio quality, and this becomes an attractive proposition indeed.
 
-- Gavin Dixon, MusicWeb International

Classical Music

For the most part Arcadi Volodos' recital from the Musikverein Wien on March 1, 2009 is about sensuality and tone painting, as aptly demonstrated by the four short Scriabin works that open the program. He plays the Op. 11 No. 16 Prélude (slow unison octaves that quote Chopin's Op. 35 Marche Funebre) slowly, freely, and colorfully. Tonal allure abounds throughout the Scriabin Seventh sonata, together with Volodos' careful attention to the composer's specific expressive intentions, from "avec trouble" to "joyeux" and the like. A strong, purposeful intent informs the pianist's affetuoso touches in Ravel's Valses nobles et sentimentales: for example, the first movement's italicizations, the fifth movement's lingerings, and the humorous lope he brings to the sixth's ascending three-note motive.

However, the real Volodos magic happens in the recital's second half, beginning with one of the most ravishing performances of Schumann's Waldszenen I've encountered since Richter's reference 1956 studio recording. The meltingly appropriate rubato and tonal inflections in the first piece's opening bars signify that we're in for a special event. Jäger auf der Lauer's cannily gauged detached chords, unflappable rapid unison runs, and rhythmically vivacious central section take your breath away, as does Volodos' creamy, non-pedaled legato touch in Einsame Blumen. The pianist paces Verrufene Stelle slowly and articulates the dotted rhythms in multi-leveled dynamic plateaus that suggest the aural equivalent of three-dimensional chess. Vogel als prophet lingers in the ear long after the little bird flies away, on account of Volodos' unerring timing and proportioned tempo fluctuations.

Volodos' considerable resources as a colorist, plus his innate affinity for Liszt's sweeping rhetoric and "piano as orchestra" sound world, breathe vibrant, theatrical life into the Dante Sonata, which often can sound like an endless octave etude. Three lyrical encores provide gentle decompression for an obviously enthralled audience and hopefully for home listeners. The slightly distant yet warm sonics accurately reflect what Volodos sounds like from choice seats in a world-class concert venue.

– Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com

A shattering memento of what was clearly an astounding concert. Volodos draws colors from the piano that others can only dream of.

– Gramophone

Classical Music

*** This title is a reissue of a Japanese release with liner notes in Japanese. ***

The shimmering, romantically lush sound of the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy is perfectly suited to these large scale, epic works. For many listeners, these performances from the 1970s were their introductions to Rachmaninov's inspiring and heroic Symphony No. 2 as well as Scriabin's hyper-romantic, alluring Poem of Ecstasy. - Greg La Traille, ArkivMusic.com

*** This title is a reissue of a Japanese release with liner notes in Japanese. ***

Classical Music

Recorded between 1955 and 1961, Vladimir Sofronitsky's performances of the piano sonatas of Alexander Scriabin are collected in this twofer and are nearly complete, except for his partial recording of the Sonata No. 1 in F minor, of which only the final movement is provided, and the absence of the Piano Sonata No. 7. For his time, Sofronitsky was the leading Russian interpreter of Scriabin, and his interpretations were impressive for their brilliant virtuosity and volatile expressive power. Yet these dynamic performances ...range from murky, boxy sound to outright distortion, and the volume levels are severely out of balance, especially in the bonus 1951 recording of Heinrich Neuhaus playing the Sonata No. 1, an odd way to redress the missing Sofronitsky movements. Furthermore, Sviatoslav Richter's live 1964 performance of the Sonata No. 7 is included, which, with the Neuhaus, allows Profil to claim the set is complete. Because the value of these recordings is almost entirely in their historical significance, rather than for sound quality or ease of enjoyment, they are recommended for Scriabin specialists and fans of Sofronitsky who don't already have them, but few others. - All Music Guide