Ravel, Scriabin, Schubert – Alexander Schimpf

Some pianists announce themselves with a Chopin ballade or a Beethoven war-horse. Alexander Schimpf, a young German pianist not much known on these shores, chose instead to walk into three separate rooms of the repertoire and rearrange the furniture in each. That took nerve. It also, mostly, worked.

Le Tombeau de Couperin is a minefield disguised as a suite of dances — Ravel’s tribute to Baroque form and to six friends killed in the First World War, grief wearing the powdered wig of Couperin’s century. Schimpf’s prelude comes off the blocks almost too fast, fingers chasing the sixteenth notes with a kind of eager impatience, as though he can’t wait to get to the fugue. The fugue, once he arrives, is the real prize: voiced with a clarity that lets you hear all four lines breathing independently, no small feat in Ravel’s dry contrapuntal weave. The rigaudon snaps, really snaps, with the kind of rhythmic bite that separates pianists who understand French dance from pianists who merely play the notes. The minuet sings without turning sentimental. Only the toccata pushes him to his limits: those hammered repeated notes test anyone’s wrist, and there are a few bars where you sense Schimpf hanging on rather than driving forward. Compared with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet’s aristocratic control, or Abbey Simon’s old-school elegance, or the sly jazz inflection Michael Endres brings to that fugue, Schimpf doesn’t unseat any of them. But he belongs in the conversation. For a debut disc, that’s no small compliment.

Between the two big scores, Scriabin: five preludes, op. 74, written in the last months of a short life that ended, mysteriously and rather Scriabin-ishly, from an infected lip. By this point he’d abandoned key signatures the way some abandon old friends. These are aphorisms, sixty or ninety seconds each, harmonically unmoored, closer to incantation than to sonata-thinking. Schimpf doesn’t try to tame them into sense. He lets them be strange. The last prelude ends on a dissonance so unresolved it practically dares the next work on the program to answer it, and Schubert does, instantly, with that long B-flat opening theme unspooling like a held breath. Smart programming, this juxtaposition; whether by Schimpf’s design or his producer’s, it earns its keep.

And then the Schubert: the last sonata, D960, written weeks before the composer’s death, music that seems to know something about time the rest of us don’t. Schimpf’s account is soft-grained, luminous, sung rather than stated. The slow movement floats, really floats, phrases handed off with the kind of legato that makes you forget the piano is a percussion instrument. But I wanted more shadow. Around the five-minute mark of the first movement, that famous lurch into the darkness — the trill drops from G-flat to F-sharp, the harmony rewinds, and Schubert seems to glimpse the abyss he’s about to fall into — Schimpf smooths the passage over, keeps the surface unbroken where Richter or Sokolov or, more recently, Paul Lewis let it genuinely frighten. This sonata needs its terror as much as its tenderness. Without both, it’s simply pretty, and D960 was never meant to be simply pretty.

Still: a first international release that dares Ravel, Scriabin, and Schubert in a single sitting, and brings something personal to each, deserves attention rather than nitpicking. The engineering is warm and true, the piano well caught in a room that doesn’t swallow detail. Schimpf plays like someone who has thought hard about what he wants to say, even where I’d have wanted him to say something darker. I’ll be listening for whatever he does next.