Scriabin Piano Works – Vladimir Feltsman

Alexander Scriabin believed himself the herald of a new cosmic order, a composer-mystic who would dissolve the boundary between art and divinity in one great synesthetic conflagration — the notorious unrealized Mysterium, to be performed in the Himalayas, after which the world, presumably, would end. It didn’t happen. What we have instead is a body of piano music that traces the journey from perfumed Chopin-worship to a private harmonic language nobody else has ever quite managed to speak fluently. Vladimir Feltsman’s new recital, drawn from across the whole arc of that journey, is a useful reminder of how strange this composer remains, a century on.

Feltsman is no stranger to odysseys like this — his recent discography reads like a series of pilgrimages, Bach one year, Schumann the next — and here he’s chosen thirty-one small pieces, miniatures mostly, some barely a minute long, that add up to something like a self-portrait of Scriabin at every age. The early Chopin-shadowed preludes of op. 11. The febrile, hothouse harmonies of the middle period. The last gasps of tonality itself in the op. 74 preludes, written the year before he died of blood poisoning from an infected lip, at forty-three, still convinced greatness awaited.

What strikes you first about Feltsman’s approach is its refusal of goo. Scriabin playing has a long, perfumed tradition — Sofronitsky’s opium-den rubato, Horowitz’s liquid legerdemain, Richter’s spun-sugar half-pedaling — and Feltsman wants none of it. His voicing is clean, almost astringent. Inner voices that usually drown in pedal come through here with unusual definition; you hear the actual counterpoint Scriabin was writing, not just the harmonic vapor it’s suspended in. In the two Poèmes, op. 32, and especially in “Poème agile” from op. 51, there’s a rhythmic snap that feels almost Classical — startling, given how routinely this repertoire gets smeared into impressionist mush.

The Piano Sonata No. 4 in F sharp major, op. 30, is the disc’s substantial argument, and Feltsman plays it with real conviction in its ecstatic final pages — those trilling, bell-like textures meant to evoke a star, Scriabin said, that grows brighter and brighter until it explodes into light. The explosion here is thrilling. But it’s also — and I say this having sat with several versions over the years — a little hard-edged, the fortissimos landing with a percussive clang rather than the enveloping, orchestral wash some pianists find. Whether that’s a fault or a corrective depends on your taste. I lean toward finding it bracing.

Feltsman is at his best in the late work — the two Dances, op. 73, and Vers la flamme, op. 72, which is really a tone poem in miniature, its opening murmur climbing by scarcely perceptible degrees into blinding, sustained brilliance. Here his refusal to over-pedal pays real dividends: you feel the harmonic ground shift under your feet, chord by chord, mystic-chord by mystic-chord, without the fog that usually obscures how radical this music actually is. “Flammes sombres,” dark and coiling, has an unsettling, almost Bergian tension. Beautifully controlled.

Elsewhere the results are more mixed. Some of the earlier preludes — the two from op. 11, the group from op. 16 — come off a touch brisk, dispatched rather than lingered over, as though Feltsman were eager to get to the good part. And there is, admittedly, a sameness to his touch across thirty-one pieces that a more chameleonic pianist — Ashkenazy, say, in his complete Decca survey — avoids by finding a distinct sound-world for each opus. The instrument, a Steinway captured in a resonant, occasionally clangorous acoustic, doesn’t always help: fortissimos acquire a metallic ring that some will find exciting and others simply hard.

Still. This is a serious, thoughtfully sequenced traversal of a composer who resists easy characterization — not the incense-and-velvet Scriabin of legend, but a sharper, more architecturally minded figure, someone who knew exactly what he was doing even when what he was doing was slightly insane. Recommended, with the caveat that listeners wedded to the more narcotic tradition of Scriabin interpretation may occasionally want to reach for their Sofronitsky afterward, just to remember what all that incense smelled like.