If more pianists played Scriabin like Garrick Ohlsson, more pianists would play Scriabin. It will be interesting to see what happens over this Scriabin Year, the 100th anniversary of Alexander Scriabin's death, but there's still a lot of sniffing in music circles (if less so in the piano world) about the quality, even seriousness, of the music of this unabashed proto-mystic as closely associated with his ideas of musical synesthesia (the colors and other attributes of sound) as he is with genre-busting composition. Not surprisingly, his advocates have largely been pianists of extremes: Vladimir Horowitz, Sviatoslav Richter, Grigory Sokolov to name only the "moderns," performers with cult followings whose concerts were events the moment they were announced.
Like those, Ohlsson, incidentally an out San Franciscan, has proved himself across an enormous repertoire; such as he's a specialist, it's in the music of Chopin, not incidentally Scriabin's musical forebear. Unlike them, his long-term advocacy of Scriabin has reliably stopped just short of the identifiably crazy. Nothing in his new recording of Scriabin's Complete Poeme (Hyperion) is going to turn blue, or turn you blue, or literally burst into flame, but it will be something if the anniversary year produces a better or more important Scriabin CD.
On March 14, Ohlsson will play five of the composer's singular sonatas, including the visionary final three, at SFJazz Center, and a word to the wise is sufficient. The peak Scriabin experience in my life was Horowitz's performance of the 10th Sonata at Carnegie Hall on April 17, 1966 (now on Sony), which, hundreds of listenings later, has lost none of its power of transport. But I'd still show up at Ohlsson's go at the piece with the expectation of having my molecules rearranged.
The poemes, of which Ohlsson gives a more complete set than others have, span Scriabin's peak years, form 1903-14, and taken together they are a reliable guide to his development as a composer, from fevered post-Romantic to crusading modernist. One of the great things about the CD is its giving the pieces in order of composition, oddly unusual for a Scriabin disc but characteristic of its overall thoughtfulness.
Most of the pieces summon the words used to describe Russian single-hair lacquer paintings of the period: exquisite Russian miniatures. Typically about two minutes long �" the most expansive of them, "Poeme-nocturne," extraordinary in its exploration of states on the edges of consciousness, in and out of reams, is 6:46 here �" they carve precise if plastic shapes out of tactile time, and leave in their wake impressions both evanescent and somehow indelible. The consistent wonder of Ohlsson's playing is its clarity �" its bringing into the mix all the plays of light �" and, when called for, its enveloping delicacy (a characteristic Scriabin expression mark).
You feel as well as hear the subtle shifts in the composer's style in the two Op. 44 Poemes of 1905, the first spare, pointillist, slightly off-balance, the second impulsive, changeable, a barely contained explosion. The chromatic waltzes are, individually, intoxicating, dizzying. This music could not have happened without Chopin, but not without Schumann, either. Loaded, sprung rhythms, spun around a rock-solid core, are the norm. Melodies, fragmented, are hypnotic. Ohlsson gives you all that, plus every one of the notes.
We have Scriabin's own recording, from 1910, of "Desir," the first of the two Op. 57 Morceaux (literally, "Bits"). Even its cavernous, over-resonant acoustic cannot obscure the saturation of feeling as well as sonority. ("I am all desire, all impulse," Scriabin wrote, "it is my element.") The piece is now closely associated with Ohlsson, whose version of it in this recording is searching and refined, followed by a rapt expression of its companion piece, "Caresse dansee."
The composer's recording of Op. 32, No. 1, is testament to a level of artistic freedom that was expected in its day but would hardly be countenanced in ours. The phrasing is gestural �" you can almost see it �" less a matter of rhythmic elasticity than organization by the atomic weight of the notes. Ohlsson retains the rhythmic freedom within a more dappled, aromatic soundscape, luxuriating in the drawn-out cantabile of Scriabin's perfectly shaped melody.
The first taste of the big-boned stuff is in the "Poeme satanique" of 1903, of which Richter was a fierce proponent. Ohlsson's Satan is a more insinuating fellow who builds craftily to a big, Lisztian triumph. But the big number here is "Vers la flamme" ("Toward the flame"), as close to a motto piece as there is in Scriabin, trills ablazing, as in the 10th Sonata, and the test of any pianist's Scriabin credentials. There's an ineluctability to Ohlsson's open-eyed, horrified path into the flame that has eluded pianists more interested in going for the burn, and his following it with the two late Op. 73 Danses brings the listener all the way into the refining fires of the "Flammes sombre." The recorded sound is as natural as the music is otherworldly.