Scriabin’s mature music features mystical ecstasy entwined with satanism, violence merged with tenderness and aphrodisiacs laced with poison – all bound together in a counterpoint of short melodic shards and governed by a highly individualistic harmonic system. Complex in spirit, rich in incident and fluid in its progress, it demands quick reflexes. Too steady a hand can crush it.

Unfortunately, a steady hand is what we get from Nuno Cernadas. This works well enough in Scriabin’s earlier, more conventional music, where Cernadas provides a fair amount of pressure (say, in the thrilling recapitulation of the First Sonata’s first movement). And even in the later works, he offers moments of seductive beauty (the gossamer passages towards the beginning of the Ninth certainly draw us in). But increasingly, as Scriabin’s style develops, Cernadas lets the music blur into a homogeneous mass of sound with a weakened sense of direction.

Cernadas’s performances seem especially muddy and lacklustre when heard against the sharply characterised playing of Yunjie Chen. Chen – like Glenn Gould and Marc-André Hamelin – knows how to give each superimposed line its own colour, articulation and personality. As a consequence, passages that are smudged in Cernadas’s performances (especially in the notoriously difficult Eighth Sonata) come into focus as complex webs of competing polyrhythmic voices.

Chen has a quicksilver spirit as well, capturing the music’s roiling moods with unfailing dexterity and imagination. His unusually fast and spiky performance of the Ninth – vividly coloured, full of unexpected accents and shocking clashes of lines – is perhaps the freshest, most individual reading here; but everything else is nearly as impressive. Granted, Chen can’t match Cernadas for sheer volume, but he offers greater dynamic nuance, so the music generates a greater sense of expectation, with climaxes that boil up in dramatic ways.

That said, despite Chen’s unfathomable claim in the booklet notes that Scriabin’s sonatas are ‘obscure’ and ‘rarely played’, there’s vast competition in this repertoire, and it would be hard to say that Chen offers either the level of detail or the rhetorical insight we hear in the benchmark set by Hamelin. Nor does he eclipse the classic performances of individual sonatas by Richter, Horowitz, Sofronitsky … the list goes on. And even if you’re looking for a recent recording of the cycle, you’d do better with the revelatory set by Mariangela Vacatello, similar to Chen’s in terms of detail but significantly more explosive and even more alert to the music’s emotional twists.

Still, anyone who loves this composer will want to hear Chen, too. Unfortunately, Accentus has betrayed customers who prefer physical media: Volume 1 was released separately a few years back (10/19), but Vol 2 is apparently available only on this two-disc set, forcing those who bought the first to duplicate it if they want the follow-up.