YEVGENY SUDBIN PLAYS SCRIABIN

 

Alexander Scriabin:

Étude, Op. 8 No. 12

Sonata No. 2 (Sonate-Fantaisie), Op. 19

Étude from Three Pieces, Op. 2

Four Mazurkas from Op. 3

Sonata No. 5, Op. 53

Nuances from Four Pieces, Op. 56

Poème from Two Pieces, Op. 59

Sonata No. 9, ‘Messe noire’, Op. 68

Valse, Op. 38

 

Yevgeny Sudbin (piano)

 

 ‘Oh, how easy it is to become possessed by Scriabin, one of the most enigmatic and controversial and artistic personalities of all time’ – this is how Yevgeny Sudbin begins his own liner notes to this disc. He continues: ‘Scriabin was not only the first to introduce madness into music; he also managed to synthesize it into an infectious virus that is entirely music-borne and affects the psyche in a highly irrational way.’ The Scriabin virus has certainly affected Sudbin, with audible results in this programme which combines some of the visionary composer’s earliest works (an Étude from 1887, four Mazurkas from 1889), with the delirious Fifth Sonata and Sonata No. 9, nick-named ‘Messe noire’.

 

Less than three years have passed since Yevgeny Sudbin’s remarkable début on disc: a Scarlatti recital which caused reviewers to compare the then 25-year old pianist favourably to Horowitz and Pletnev. The following Rachmaninov disc caused Piano Magazine to describe him as “a major, world-class artist – a fearless technician with an all-encompassing command of his instrument; a musical dramatist of exceptional acumen and sophistication; a poet who moves seamlessly between unbridled rhetoric and extreme intimacy; a stylist who catches the particular spirit of everything he plays...”

 

The latest offering – an intriguing double-bill of Tchaikovsky’s and Medtner’s First Piano Concertos – was released previously this year, earning him an Editor’s Choice in Gramophone. The grounds for that distinction, as given in the magazine, are certainly just as apt for the present Scriabin recital: “Yevgeny Sudbin's performance here fairly explodes with imagination, feeling and desire. Here, one feels, is a pianist hungry to test himself intellectually and emotionally as well as technically.”

 

BIS SACD BISSACD1568