Kondrashin gives an enthusiastic and affectionate account of Scriabin's most sumptuous score, backed by orchestral playing of such quality that it draws an enthusiastic pounding of feet as well as loud applause at the end. It is fully deserved: the string playing is beautifully warm, the massed horns bay most impressively at that point in the slow movement where God ticks off Scriabin severely for his fleshly chromaticisms, there is a lovely solo violin ad some precise yet fluid woodwind in the scene in the aviary not long after, and the trumpet's call to the 'divine games' of the finale is brilliantly spirited.
All this would be quite enough for most symphonies, but not for this one: only with blazing faith in Scriabin's genius (or a convincing semblance of it) can the opening movement be prevented from sounding a good ten minutes too long; only a firm sense of direction beneath the swoonings of the slow movement can save them from sounding both static and repulsive; most difficult of all, the final pile-driving climax has to have a sense of magnificent achievement to it if the whole exercise of performing the piece at all is to seem worthwhile. Ideally, both conductor and orchestra need to seem as wound-up and transported by visionary fervour as Scriabin presumably was when he wrote it. The symphony is easier to take, no doubt, if you avert your gaze from all the mystical trappings with which he bedecked it, but I doubt whether a conductor can afford to do so.
Kondrashin's opening, for example, is solemn enough, but it is just a shade too fast to register as the image of 'divine grandeur' that it is supposed to be; the ensuing allegro is energetic, but it is marked ''mysterieux et tragique'' and I can hear little of the former quality here and none of the latter. Pritchard on BBC Artium demonstrates that mystery, at least, can be brought to this passage. Kondrashin seems to be approaching the work as though it were rather over-wrought Rachmaninov or neurasthenic Borodin, but Scriabin has to be taken on his own terms or not at all. Pritchard is at once more willing to linger than Kondrashin (he takes three minutes longer over the piece) and more successful in maintaining a sense of destination; he is also more careful at pointing up voluptuous details and at following Scriabin's extravagant expression marks as closely to the letter as he can get. He has the better recording, too, with a wider dynamic range, a transparency to even the densest tuttis and a very natural clarity of detail. The newcomer is pre-digital and sounds it rather (the climaxes bit confused, the perspective not always clear); the only obvious effect of CD is the crisp realism of a distracting amount of platform noise.'