This is the long-delayed final instalment of Ashkenazy's Scriabin cycle (Nos. 2, 7 and 10 are available on SXL6868, 9/78; Nos. 3, 4, 5 and 9 on SXL6705, 7/81—all LP only), and although these sonatas are not among the best known of the ten, they are all fascinating in one way or another and there are some magnificent things in the playing. The First Sonata is the product of an ambitious, self-indulgent 20-year-old, alternating between hyper-activity and exhaustion. The finale is a funeral march, composed a year before the more famous final Adagio of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique, as Hugh McDonald's sleeve-note points out, and it contains pre-echoes of the celebrated D sharp minor Etude. Ashkenazy takes the first movement by storm, and his current hard-hitting way is well-adapted to the tumultous scherzo. In point of fact, Roberto Szidon is more successful in the rather featureless slow movement and in the pppp quasi niente choral episode of the finale (DG 2707 058, 6/72—nla), as he is in generally conveying a greater sense of danger in the fast movements. But Ashkenazy's depth of sound and the clarity of Decca's recording are not to be denied.
The Four Pieces of Op. 51 lay bare the sources of some of the mature Scriabin's most characteristic utterances—the second Chopin Prelude for the lugubrious No. 2, Schumann's Vogel als Prophet for the ecstatic ''Poeme aile''. And the Sixth Sonata surely shows that at least some of his representations of evil derive from Ravel's Gaspard. The Sixth is a work of compelling strangeness, like the stirrings of inchoate primordial matter—I know Colin Matthews rates it as one of the formative influences on his own music. Its final 'delirious dance' actually rises to a D above the top note of the piano (could the piano tuner not have made this available for the recording, given that the top C is not used?). Ashkenazy plays with terrific sustained intensity here, and brings the piece off even more successfully, I feel, than he does the Eighth Sonata. The latter sounds a fraction calculated, and it makes rather less impression as a work, too, although its sense of drifting in and out, as though a fragment of a much longer process, is beautifully controlled.'