After a long delay, Gordon Fergus-Thompson continues his Scriabin series for ASV with Volume 4, the complete Mazurkas. The Mazurka remains an intransigently indigenous dance genre, and Chopin's incomparable example is more than a hard act to follow. However, Scriabin was among the few who accepted such a challenge wholeheartedly and, while his gratitude to his beloved Polish master is obvious, so too is the skill with which he takes Chopin's Slavonicism on a journey through bittersweet nostalgia into a more convoluted idiom and, finally, into a pensive and hallucinatory shadowland.
The elusive character of these fascinating and neglected works could hardly be presented more vividly and insinuatingly than by Fergus-Thompson. How well he understands the way Scriabin's momentary high spirits (in, say, No 4) collapse into morbid introspection in No 5 - into a close-knit chromaticism later refined still further by dark and obsessive intervals and patterning. The balletic leaps of No 6 are deftly contrasted with its sinuous central melody, and, however circuitous the route from A to B, Fergus-Thompson travels it with a special clarity and romantic fervour. The two confidential Op 40 Mazurkas are a notable success, and the recordings are crystalline and immediate. Volume 5 is eagerly awaited.
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