We have detected that you are using an adblocking plugin in your browser.

The revenue we earn by the advertisements is used to manage this website. Please whitelist our website in your adblocking plugin.

LEBRECHT LISTENS | Scriabin Is Still The Living Heart Of Russian Pianism

By Norman Lebrecht on February 11, 2022

Alexander_Scriabin

Alexander Scriabin: Mazurkas (Hyperion)

★★★★★

🎧 Amazon

No-one ever built a career on Scriabin. The Russian composer is altogether too quirky, too much a self-declared outsider, to draw a mainstream following. Lions of the piano raided his lesser pieces for encores, but never played a Scriabin concerto or a full recital. Vladimir Horowitz, who played for the composer as a ten-year-old boy, is a rare devotee who made a Scriabin D# minor Etude his Carnegie Hall calling card.

All the more reason to applaud the young Russian virtuoso Andrey Gugnin for investing in an album of Mazurkas, a Polish national dish that demonstrates Scriabin’s attachment to Chopin. An early opus 3 set has little to rivet the attention and much that is repetitive; likewise, a midlife opus 25 set. But two Mazurkas, opus 40 take us right to the heart of Scriabin and to the very edge of tonality. Scriabin messes not only with tonal relations but with tempi, disrupting the flow of a melodic line and keeping the player on the qui vive for sudden changes and incomprehensible diversions.

Andrey Gugnin handles these caprices with studied nonchalance and an uncommon ear for fleeting beauty. He reminds us that Scriabin, while marginal to modern concerts, is the living heart of Russian pianism, a patriarch whose influence extends through the Moscow teacher Heinrich Neuhaus, through his students Richter and Gilels, and beyond to define a distinctive Russian approach to black and white keys that is founded on an absence of nationalism, an openness to other sounds.

To read more from Norman Lebrecht, subscribe to Slippedisc.com.

#LUDWIGVAN

Get the daily arts news straight to your inbox.

Sign up for the Ludwig van Daily — classical music and opera in five minutes or less HERE.

Share this article
lv_toronto_banner_high_590x300
comments powered by Disqus

FREE ARTS NEWS STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX, EVERY MONDAY BY 6 AM

company logo

Part of

Terms of Service & Privacy Policy
© 2024 | Executive Producer Moses Znaimer