Scriabin: Vers la Flamme album review – Sudbin masters and humanises fourth and 10th sonatas

The Guardian

15-05-2025

One of Yevgeny Sudbin's first discs for the BIS label in 2007 was a Scriabin recital. It included three of the piano sonatas alongside a selection of miniatures that ranged right across Scriabin's composing career, and, for his 25th release on the label, Sudbin has returned to the same composer and the same programming scheme. Though it's the very late, intensely compressed poem Vers la Flamme from 1914 that provides the album's title, it's the two sonatas here, the fourth and the 10th, that provide the weight and focus, with a selection of smaller-scale pieces – selections of preludes from Scriabin's Op 11 and Op 16, and études from Op 8 and Op 42, as well as the B minor Fantasie Op 28. The disc plots out the creative journey that Scriabin made, from its Chopinesque beginnings in the preludes, to the rarefied world of his final works, in which he forged his own utterly original brand of modernism.
Sudbin's mastery of every technical challenge that Scriabin's piano writing throws up is hugely impressive, the colours he finds in the music always beguiling. But sometimes he does seem temperamentally more comfortable with the earlier pieces rather than the more acerbic later style. His treatment of the preludes, each one a tiny Romantic jewel, is exquisite, the account of the two-movement fourth sonata teasingly elusive, and though he builds tension remorselessly through Vers la Flamme and negotiates the thickets of trills in the 10th sonata with wonderful clarity, neither work quite reaches the extreme levels of expression that other pianists have found. On disc, at least, no pianist has come closer to conveying that intensity than Vladimir Horowitz, whose Scriabin recordings remain unequalled, let alone surpassed; Sudbin humanises this music where Horowitz makes it forbidding and alien.
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