Eric Le Van, American-born but French-based, gives us youthful, ardent and communicative performances of Scriabin’s Mazurkas. Music to ‘tease us out of thought’, the Mazurkas are a magical if disturbing distillation of Scriabin’s introverted nature. Remembering Chopin yet evolving into the sort of idiosyncrasy that made Stravinsky ask, ‘Scriabin, where does he come from, and who are his followers?’, they are, as Le Van tells us in his notes, ‘Mazurka-fantasies’ wheeling intricately and obsessively round a single idea before expanding into ever more fragmentary and hallucinatory states of mind. A Boston critic stung into irritation wrote: ‘There are those who think that the air is filled with green monkeys with crimson eyes and sparkling tails, a kind of ecstasy that is sold in Russia at two roubles a bottle.’

The challenge for the pianist is exceptional and Eric Le Van, following the descriptions he quotes of Scriabin’s own performance style – ‘feverish, sumptuous, ethereal’ – spins off an extraordinary sequence in a haunting and improvisatory manner, his rubato suggesting Scriabin’s volatile and pent-up nature, quivering on the edge of neurosis. And whether in the violent interjections of No 10, the melancholy withdrawal of No 13 or the surprising, starry resolution of so much darkness in No 21, he makes it clear that his recording was a labour of love. Le Van faces stiff and sometimes more lucid competition from both Artur Pizarro (Collins, 6/94 – nla) and Gordon Fergus-Thompson, but his finely recorded readings are magically fleet and affectionate.