This two-disc reissue of recordings dating from 1972-74 includes not only Scriabin’s 10 established sonatas but also his two early Op posth sonatas and a selection from his later works. This complements a five-CD set of the rest of Scriabin’s piano music, a richly comprehensive offering allowing one to reassess the composer’s widely fluctuating reputation and also the playing of the American pianist Michael Ponti, whose gargantuan recitals of mostly little-known Romantic virtuoso music during the 1970s caused a stir.

Then, his recordings poured forth, usually in raw and unacceptable sound which only partly hid a phenomenal facility that easily engulfed everything in its path. True, you would hardly call his playing texturally luminous or subtle, but in, for example, the seething vortex of the E flat minor Sonata’s finale, and the nightmarish gallop of the First Sonata’s second movement presto – and in his ability to rise to wild directions such as vertiginoso con furia and estatico (Sonata No 5) – he leaves you in no doubt of his empathy for Scriabin’s tortured, refined and neurotic idiom, his ultra-Romanticism. Here, Ponti turns on the heat with the best of them and his elemental virtuosity lights up Scriabin’s night sky with a rare brilliance and an almost palpable frisson.

Alas, even he can do little to persuade one otherwise than that the later sonatas (notably Nos 6-8) show a falling off in quality; there is music where obsessive harmonic and rhythmic patterning are coupled with extraordinary instructions (onde caressante, trés pur, avec une céleste volupté, etc) that promise more than they deliver. In late Scriabin, titles and directions, while purporting to suggest opposites, become virtually interchangeable, and it is no small wonder that for some the Ninth Sonata is a ‘Black Mass’ while for the composer it remains ‘seraphic’. Is the Tenth Sonata radiant or diabolic? The answers and arguments may come thick and fast but they are rarely convincing.

Superior sets of the 10 or 11 (as opposed to Ponti’s 12) sonatas are available from Vladimir Ashkenazy and Marc-André Hamelin both of another order in both sound and presentation. But that should not deter avid collectors from Ponti’s set, particularly when the playing shows such a compulsive fire and vitality.